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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE OLD FAITH IN THE NEW DAY 


THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 
AN ADVENTURE IN ORTHODOXY 





SUFFICIENT 
MINISTERS 


BY 
JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 


Introduction by 
BISHOP WILLIAM F. McDOWELL 


THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK :: :: :: CINCINNATI 





Copyright, 1925, by 
JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign 
languages, including the Scandinavian. 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


ORM ORD facie oc aicrate att See lala Nae ee 7 
INTRODUCTION .......... SOE ee eh Ree aie 9 

I. Tue PrREeEAcHER IN AMERICAN HIsToRY 
ANDO LAVTS. .  Ceeer eR eY. see sot 15 

Il. Tue PREACHER AS THE INTERPRETER 
Oise Tis: AGH. unre: | tee is 40 

Ill. THe PREACHER IN THE DIRECTION OF 
SOCTALREFORM \0. 40 0. vc oeee ere. 64 

IV. Tue PREACHER AND THE CREATION OF 
PUBLIC OPINION.  o oc: 1 hate 88 
VY. Tue PREACHER AND THE PRESENT Hour 113 













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FOREWORD 


THE Matthew Simpson Lectureship on “The 
Christian Ministry” was established in De- 
Pauw University for the purpose of setting 
forth in its true light the vocation of the 
preacher. The Matthew Simpson Foundation 
provides for bringing to the University every 
year a preacher of distinction to interpret the 
task of the Christian minister to college men. 
This series of lectures by the Reverend Joseph 
M. M. Gray, D.D., Litt.D., on Surricient MIn- 
ISTERS is a noble memorial to Bishop Matthew 
Simpson, prince among American preachers, , 
and first president of DePauw University. 
Among all the books that have appeared 
recently on preaching, none gives a finer por- 
trayal of the power and dignity of the pulpit 
than Doctor Gray has given in this volume. 

This book sets the modern prophet of God 
in his true light as the interpreter of spiritual 
things in the vernacular of his own age, as the 
inspiring genius of the great social move- 
ments, as the commanding voice crying in the 
wilderness of confused public opinion, ever- 
more revealing the mind of Christ to the mind 
of the world. It will meet most effectively the 

7 


8 FOREWORD 


cheap and vociferous criticism that is being 
heaped upon the Christian minister and the 
church. The reading of these lectures will 
breathe new hope into many a discouraged 
preacher who has lost the sense of the great- 
ness and dignity of his calling. Doctor Gray 
has revealed to us the minister of the gospel 
not as a frocked ecclesiastic on a pedestal, not 
as a parish priest busy with small matters, 
nor yet as a religious dabbler in social and 
civic affairs, but as a man among men, inter- 
preting eternal things with a clear mind, spir- 
itual insight, a burning heart, and moral fear- 
lessness, so that through the preacher the 
people still hear the “Thus saith the Lord.” 

The previous lecturers on this foundation 
were Bishop Francis J. McConnell, of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Rever- 
end Doctor Charles E. Jefferson, of Broadway 
Tabernacle Congregational Church, New York 
City. 

GuHOoRGE R. GROSE. 


INTRODUCTION 


Here is a preacher who heartily believes 
in preaching. He takes with a noble serious- 
ness the high task and privilege of being a 
preacher of Christ. He regards the history 
of preaching with a proper pride and its 
present opportunity as an inspiring challenge. 
He knows full well the weaknesses and im- 
perfections of the ministry, past and present, 
and does not conceal the actual facts from his 
own or any other eyes. He is sensitively 
aware how frail is the earthen vessel in which 
the treasure of preaching is carried, but his 
eye is always on the treasure, his rapture 
always on the transcending power of God, so 
that in spite of the earthen character of the 
vessel and the weakness of the preacher him- 
self, he “never loses heart in this ministry 
which by God’s mercy he holds” (Moffatt). 
And in this volume of lectures spoken on a 
foundation established in memory of Matthew 
Simpson this modern preacher has nobly pic- 
tured The Preacher in American History and 
Life, The Preacher as the Interpreter of His 
Age, The Preacher in the Direction of Social 
Reform, The Preacher and the Creation of 

9 


10 INTRODUCTION 


Public Opinion, and The Preacher and the 
Present Hour. And in all these pages one 
sees flashes of revealing light from the lives 
and spirits of those who have “kept the 
soul of the world alive” through pioneer days 
when the republic was in its early making 
down to this hour when it is in its later and 
probably its more critical period. But one 
also sees all the time those significant revela- 
tions of the lecturer’s own ideals and spirit, 
insights and purposes which make his own 
ministry in our own times. So that the 
volume becomes, as any real lectures on 
preaching must always become, a genuinely 
human document and not an abstract study. 
Any book that causes the fire of true preach- 
ing to burn afresh is good, especially good in 
these times when so many forces and influ- 
ences work against preaching and the 
preacher; when so many voices are even Say- 
ing that the day of the preacher is passing, 
if not already past. Of course the ministry 
always has to face adverse conditions, and is 
always the subject of gloomy predictions. Dr. 
Joseph Fort Newton, in his volume Some Liv- 
ing Masters of the Pulpit, reminds us that 
when Professor Mahaffey wrote his volume on 
The Decay of Modern Preaching, “Parker, 
Liddon, Spurgeon, McLaren, Beecher, Brooks, 


INTRODUCTION 11 


Broadus and Simpson were in the full splen- 
dor of their powers.” He might have added 
many other names to that list. But we 
may well be grateful to those ministers in 
every period who by their books, or by 
their ministries, or both, do keep the glori- 
ous glow upon preaching and the way it is 
regarded in the world. I think in one of 
John Morley’s essays, perhaps the one on 
Wordsworth, he states that at a certain period 
in English history “great fires were burning, 
but they were burning low.” It is a bad thing 
for the world and for the church in the world 
when the fires of preaching are allowed to 
burn low. ‘Those fires ought never to be 
banked or allowed to get low. We recently 
had to add to the heating facilities in the 
house we live in. We did it by installing in 
addition to the regular heater, four or five gas 
stoves having a most suggestive name; “radi- 
ant fire burners.” Make no account of the 
fact that they burn gas. Do not work out any 
flippancies about gas and preaching. All that 
has been overdone and is no longer fresh 
humor. But think of that other term “radiant 
fire’! The names of a dozen preachers, some 
dead, some living, leap to my lips as I write 
the words. I see their faces and hear their 
voices as they pour out upon the chilled lives 


12 INTRODUCTION 


of men and women the glorious gospel of the 
blessed God with a “radiant fire,” and in so 
doing bring warmth and glow to the hearts of 
men. 

These are the men whose lips are touched 
as with live coals from the altar of the Most 
High; who “maintain the spiritual glow” that 
keeps the world from going utterly drab; who 
keep the “lamp aglow upon the feet of men, 
and shining upon the paths of men”; who 
themselves “walk in the light” of Him who is 
ever shining in the dark places of human life. 

Blessings upon all the ministers who think 
in a great way of the ministry itself and who 
by preaching and life make it to seem and to 
be the noble power it is for the life of man- 
kind. 

WILLIAM FRASER McDOwWELL. 

Bishop’s Residence, Washington, D. C. 





Our sufficiency is from God; who also made 
us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant.— 
2 Corinthians 3. 6. 


I 


THE PREACHER IN AMERICAN 
HISTORY AND LIFE 


OnkE of the luminous phases which, here and 
there amid our duller language, shines like a 
sword flashed in sunlight, is the simple motto 
of the Army and the Navy, “For the honor of 
the service.” It suggests at once the noble- 
ness of a great tradition and the pride of an 
illustrious fellowship. It intimates to feel- 
ing as well as to thought that the compensa- 
tions of service are in no mean or mercenary 
rewards, but in qualities of life, in steward- 
ships of purpose, and high experiences of more 
than common duty. “For the honor of the 
service,” like a flag upon a coffin, will explain 
without a detail, a soldier’s heroism, a sailor’s 
courage, immeasureable suffering, infinite 
labor, a lonely death. It is something of the 
spirit thus invoked which should be vibrant 
in any thought of the Christian ministry; and 
it is in the hope of awakening something of 
that feeling that this chapter is devoted to a 
survey of the preacher in American history 
and life. 

15 


16 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


The limits of a single chapter prevent any- 
thing more than the most brief outline of what 
is, at best, an epic story. Adequately to trace 
the preacher in his march through American 
history and life would require a volume, while 
to broaden the survey to the world beyond our 
continent and our short three hundred years 
would be to rewrite the annals of western civi- 
lization. Notwithstanding this, when one 
undertakes to tell the preacher’s place in his- 
tory he is involved in perhaps the most aston- 
ishing of life’s ironies of unrecognition. For 
the preacher is the maker of history of whom 
historians are mute, the builder of empires of 
whom emperors have never heard, the creator 
of states whom statesmen have ignored, the 
herald of democracy whom demagogues and 
people have forgotten, the founder of educa- 
tion whom educators have scorned, the leader 
of philanthropies whom philanthropists dis- 
credit. Preachers, for the most part, have 
been obscure; yet without their presence soci- 
ety disintegrates into a dangerous individu- 
alism, human life grows cheap, conventions 
tested by generations of moral enterprise 
wither in disuse, and laws cannot be enforced. 
Since the time of Saint Paul the preacher has 
been made a spectacle unto all men. Nothing 
is at once more ludicrous and misleading than 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 18's 


the preacher of fiction, except the preacher of 
the stage. On the stage, marriage ceremonies 
are performed backward, which is typical of 
the ridiculous misrepresentation of the minis- 
try in those arts which most presume to hold 
a mirror up to life. With few exceptions, the 
hypocrites, the clowns, the crooks, the carica- 
tures of the ministry are given ample pub- 
licity, while the real preacher who, more than 
any other man, has established schools, initi- 
ated philanthropies, maintained the inherit- 
ance of culture uninterrupted, and in crucial 
epochs shaped confused political thinking into 
moral purposes and use, has not yet come into 
his own. 

That preacher bulks large in American 
experience. To look at, he is not an heroic 
figure; but his life, for the most part, is an 
heroic life. He is not always well educated ; 
but he is generally more widely read and more 
disciplined to think than the average of his 
neighbors. He is not always well bred; but 
nevertheless he adds to the durable values of 
the community. He is not always tactful or 
patient, and he is sometimes selfish, for he 
also has his treasure in an earthen vessel; but 
there are generally large aspects of generosity 
about him, and he is almost always capable of 
great sacrifice without advertising it. Behind 


18 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


all that makes the splendid story of the nation 
—its rougher conquests, its loftier aims, its 
greatening freedom, its more solid prosperi- 
ties—is the innumerable company of its 
preachers, unhonored, unremembered, unre- 
warded, who were as faithful as they have 
been forgotten, and whose unrecorded labors 
have been indispensable in the making of a 
history which, as Channing put it, “has not a 
place even in the margin for the minister and 
the school mistress.” 

There is no better beginning for such a sur- 
vey as has been indicated than with the 
preacher as pioneer. Someone, speaking to 
this theme a few years ago, remarked that in 
all the settlement of America only in Virginia 
was the church an afterthought; and in the 
origins of settlements the church, of course, 
means preeminently the preacher. It was a 
preacher, John Robinson, who from the quay 
at Delft, put courage into the aching hearts 
of the Pilgrims as the Mayflower slid slowly 
down the lonely highway of the sea. From 
the Mayfiower, for two hundred years the 
story of New England is the story of stern 
Puritan preachers whose hands, though they 
sometimes lay heavy on the developing colonial 
life, were nevertheless always shaping it 
toward the most permanent and highest good. 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 19 


It is the story of Puritan preachers who were 
always building the strongest intellectual and 
moral bulwarks against the tides of social 
license and personal evil such as have, since 
their day, beaten violently around our elder 
American ideals. The shadow of the minis- 
ter of Scrooby still falls in benediction across 
the progress of democracy. 

In the rifts which mar the harmony of New 
England Puritanism, it is the preacher who 
still preserves amid his heresy the essential 
good, as the story of Rhode Island will illus- 
trate. For the history of Rhode Island can- 
not be told in the glowing recital of its pros- 
perity; its timbers and textiles, its Corliss 
engines and colleges, its politicians and dyes. 
Its history and, fundamentally, its social char- 
acter, root back in Roger Williams, a preacher 
who, banished from one colony, established 
another and became the founder of this proud 
commonwealth. 

The story of New England is practically 
the story, with slightly different colorings, of 
most of the continent. To follow the migra- 
tions of the early settlers of America is to 
travel in the footsteps of the pioneering 
preacher. It was the Jesuits who penetrated 
what they called the northern wilderness and 
invited men to the Mississippi Valley. The 


20 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


settlement of Pennsylvania is a story of Ger- 
man Protestants led by their pastors, and of 
Quakers whose preachers were no less devoted 
because they claimed no professional stand- 
ing. The Huguenots who peopled the Caro- 
linas with faith and sacrifice, were accom- 
panied, where they were not led, by their min- 
isters; and it was the devotion of Moravian 
missionaries that consecrated the soil of Ohio. 
If one extraordinary figure is wanted, it is 
that of David Brainerd, feeble in frame and 
melancholy in temperament, and dead at 
twenty-nine; but who at his death had made 
the pathways among his Indians safer for 
white feet than they had ever been before. 
While from Massachusetts to Georgia, from 
Cape Cod to the Great Lakes, every mile was 
traveled by the horses of Methodist circuit 
riders, as Pilmoor and Boardman and King 
and Williams and Embury and Strawbridge 
and Garrettson and Lee and McKendree and 
the long heroic line broke out, amid a bitter 
wilderness, a highway for free grace. “The 
whole country,” as President Roosevelt said, 
‘is under a debt of gratitude to the Methodist 
circuit riders, the Methodist preachers, whose 
movement westward kept pace with the move- 
ment of the frontier, who shared all the hard- 
ships in the life of the frontiersman, while 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 21 


at the same time ministering to that fron- 
tiersman’s spiritual needs, and seeing to it 
that his pressing material cares and the hard 
and grinding poverty of his life did not wholly 
extinguish the divine fire within his soul.” 
There can be no finer portrait of the labor of 
the pioneer preacher than that given by Doctor 
Tipple of Francis Asbury, the leader of them 
all, who “for half a century, like a spiritual 
Atlas, bore the American continent on his 
shoulders; who in his day builded altars in 
almost every city and town in the United 
States, and kindled thereon fires which have 
not yet gone out; who heralded the doctrine 
of human democracy when the nation was in 
the throes of a gigantic conflict with pater- 
nalism and aristocracy; who inculcated 
respect for law and created ideals of righteous- 
ness and citizenship along the mountain roads, 
and through the trackless forests, where Civi- 
lization walked with slow yet conquering step; 
who kept Hope alive in thousands of hearts 
where Despair ever stood at the door with a 
coffin.’ 

Asbury was the forerunner, but there were 
many who followed. In 1800 there were only 
two hundred and fifteen settlers in all of what 
is now Illinois; yet within four years Meth- 


1Tipple: The Heart of Asbury’s Journal, p. xii. 





22 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


odism had Benjamin Young preaching to that 
frontier. One cannot appreciate all the fac- 
tors which have gone to the making of that 
great State without taking account of him, 
and of a greater than he, Peter Cartwright; 
yet there is published at least one not incon- 
siderable history of [linois in which neither is 
mentioned, though Peter Cartwright was 
twice a candidate for the United States Con- 
gress against Abraham Lincoln, and once 
defeated him. A survey of the raw territory 
of Alabama in 1803 will disclose Lorenzo Dow 
pioneering there on behalf of the gospel as 
other men were pioneering for home and fam- 
ily; and a year later a Methodist preacher was 
pushing westward the frontier of Indiana. 
Tracing the progress of American expansion 
from Plymouth Rock to the Pacific slope, there 
will always be discovered in the crest of the 
advancing wave a preacher, rough-clad, unaf- 
frighted, daring men and whatever devils 
there may be in the name of civilization and 
Christ. 

There is no more moving story than that of 
the settlement of the Oregon country. It is 
a story told in the heroisms of brave men and 
braver women, some known, but more already 
forgotten by the careless inheritors of the 
empire their labors made possible. Two are 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 23 


not forgotten, Jason Lee and Marcus Whit- 
man, preachers both. Jason Lee and his 
gigantic energy in the interests of his Indian 
missions and the expanding nation, his inces- 
sant missionary activities and his perilous 
return to the East to recruit more settlers and 
to rouse Congress to the value of the North- 
west, constitute a record of patriotic and 
religious service which history is proud to pre- 
serve. What tale of tragedy is more com- 
pelling than that of his terrible journey at 
the risk of his life, with the bewildering hour 
when the Indian messenger overtakes him with 
the word that his young wife and infant child 
are dead together and together in their grave; 
—that lonely but indomitable journey for- 
ward, with a broken heart, only to find a blind 
Congress saying, “We are nearer to the remote 
nations of Europe than to Oregon,’ and 
repeating Senator Benton’s remark, made in 
1825, that “The ridge of the Rockies should 
be forever a national boundary!” 

The story of Oregon is told also in the name 
of Marcus Whitman, who, when all detracting 
criticism has done its work, will yet be found 
to have given large impetus to migration to 
the Northwest. That story of Oregon dis- 
covers him also walking, riding, running four 
thousand almost impossible miles, through 


24 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


mountain passes twenty feet in snow, through 
incessant storms, through icy rivers, the first 
white man to take that unknown Indian trail 
as he, too, hurried eastward on an errand 
which would not wait. If his interest was 
more in the critical affairs of his Mission and 
less in the expansion of the American domain 
than earlier historians would indicate, yet his 
ride is an achievement unsurpassed in the 
annals of American patriotism. Though in 
his recruiting for the Mission he rather reaped 
from Jason Lee’s sowing of two years before, 
and the elder tradition of his success at Wash- 
ington, where Lee had failed, is gravely sus- 
pect now; still it is undoubted that when, 
some months later, he returns to Oregon with 
a selected body of new settlers, it is to land 
forever American that he goes back, identi- 
fied for all time with the great events with 
which he is contemporary. It is Whitman the 
preacher, then, who seals his ministry with 
martyrdom among the Indians to whom he 
has devoted his life; and if his name be lower 
in the list of heroes than once men wrote, it 
shines the brighter for the death he died as 
one of that incomparable multitude who have 
been slain unto God. 

There are other dramatic pages in this his- 
tory of American expansion; none more 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 25 


vibrant with the strength of fearless men or 
more vivid with their sins of avarice and pas- 
sion, none more eloquent of courage and 
adventure, than that which tells the tale of 
the ’forty-niners and the lure of California 
gold. But that page will also show, in the 
gold camps and gambling houses and brawling 
streets of that lawless time, the figure of 
another preacher, William Taylor, rebuking, 
inviting, restraining, inspiring with some- 
thing of better purpose, those rough and vio- 
lent men as, in season and out, he proclaimed 
to the pioneer the chastening summons of the 
gospel. 

Further instances need not be recalled. The 
contribution which the preacher has made to 
American pioneer life is unmistakable; that 
of the Methodist preacher is conspicuous. 
From Asbury, dead these hundred years and 
more, to the least known living preacher on 
the now dissolving frontier, Methodism, as 
President Hyde has written, has been the 
revival of grace when law had lost its grip and 
love was dragging her anchor. 

But the preacher has been a pioneer not 
alone in the geographical implications of the 
word, not simply as a participant in the wild 
life of the plainsman and the settler, the min- 
ing camp and the hunter’s wilderness; but in 


26 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


the enterprises of expanding life. While he 
trod the untraveled ways of swamp and prairie 
and climbed the slopes of alien mountains, 
he was pilgriming in mind among the dis- 
ciplined and lovelier engagements of estab- 
lished culture. His body, like Abram, dwelt 
in tents; his spirit lived in the city for which 
he looked, that organized and more ideal soci- 
ety which sometime was to be. He has been 
a pioneer, not only among uninhabited and 
hostile places, but in the creation and employ- 
ment of those instruments which produce and 
sustain urbanity and peace. In law, in order, 
in philanthropy and education, he has labored 
at the beginning of things; though to illus- 
trate his service in all these areas of social 
progress reference need be made to only one. 
It is trite to remark, though no less worth 
remarking, that higher education in America 
began in the heart of a preacher, Harvard 
University being no more than the oak which 
has grown from the acorn of the Reverend 
John Harvard’s two hundred and sixty books. 
Yale is a monument to the faith and works of 
ten Congregational ministers who inaugu- 
rated the college with their personal gifts. 
Back of Princeton are the sacrificial figures of 
a group of Presbyterian clergymen. The name 
of Eleazor Wheelock is unfamiliar to the 


IN :AMERICAN LIFE 27 


present generation; but Eleazor Wheelock, a 
minister, still speaks to this generation 
through Dartmouth College, which owes its 
existence to him. Rutgers and Hamilton 
were each founded by a preacher. Iowa Col- 
lege, the oldest collegiate institution in the 
State, harks back to 18438, when eleven grad- 
uates of Andover entered the young territory 
to preach and teach. They were such men as 
DeTocqueville might have had in mind when 
he described the American pioneer as a man 
who “penetrates into the wilds of a new world 
with the Bible, an ax, and some newspapers,” 
for they had all of these articles and little else. 
Within a year or two they met to consider the 
beginning of a college, only to discover that 
their idea had been anticipated and that col- 
lege education had already begun in Iowa in 
the dreams and deeds of one of its prophetic 
figures, another preacher who lives in memory 
as Father Turner. 

In Kansas the story is the same. Back of 
Manhattan College, one of the great agricul- 
tural schools of America, is the Reverend 
Joseph Dennison, a graduate of Wilbraham 
Academy and Wesleyan University. Baker 
University, the oldest collegiate institution in 
Kansas, organized in 1856, is the direct crea- 
tion of the Methodist preachers of Kansas. 


28 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


Through those wild days upon the border it 
was a beacon of light to show the highway to 
the better days that were to be. It heard the 
tramp of John Brown’s men, and marked the 
mad passions of the border ruffians and not 
much better border gentlemen. It looked 
across the rolling hills and saw the flames of 
Lawrence when Quantrell swept down upon 
the town in a hurricane of blood and fire. 
From its first Commencement to the present 
time it has not ceased to send a steady stream 
of men and women into the conflict of right- 
eousness, and in its service to the common- 
wealth has been born much of the boldness 
and the glory which made Kansas, alone 
among a circle of unregarding States, a 
pioneer in prohibition and law enforcement. 
It is this same story which is written around 
the colleges of the continent. When one 
names the universities of America which are 
inearnating the ideals of Christian life with 
ample scholarship and liberal culture, he is 
identifying largely the monuments of preach- 
ers who dared to be pioneers in the purposes, 
the labors, the sacrifices, out of which alone 
the means of education can arise. And though 
it can be given no more than passing notice, 
it is not without immeasurable significance 
that the preacher has not only built colleges, 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 29 


he has directed and sustained them. The coat 
of arms of American education might appro- 
priately be a Prince Albert rampant on a field 
of brass. Edwards, Witherspoon, McCosh, 
Dwight, Durbin, Fiske, Olin, Gobin, to say 
nothing of the ordained men who in presi- 
dents’ chairs and at professors’ desks still live 
and labor, suggest a continuing service. It 
was a noted educator of Ohio who wrote that 
his experience had taught him to despair of 
establishing, with any permanency, even a 
good district school, where there was not a 
good church and an intelligent ministry to 
watch over and sustain it. Alike in the rough 
out thrust of a new nation to traverse and 
populate its domain, and in the persistent up- 
reach of expanding life to realize the means 
and opportunities of culture, the preacher has 
been a pioneer. 

The preacher also holds a large, if unappre- 
ciated, place in American history and life, 
as a patriot. He has not only pushed for- 
ward the frontiers of his country and leav- 
ened its society with Christian ideas and cul- 
ture; he has been second to none in the 
preservation of the country which he so 
greatly helped to make. No influence more’ 
constrained and shaped the spirit of American 
thought and life toward the time of inde- 


30 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


pendence, than that of the Election Day ser- 
mons preached before the governor of the Mas- 
sachusetts colony and the House of Represen- 
tatives on the day of election of His Majesty’s 
Council. To read those sermons from 1760 
on is to hear through them the tramp of tumul- 
tuous events draw ever near. Out of a dozen 
sermons which would serve as illustrations, 
one will be enough, that of the Reverend Gad 
Hitchcock which he preached on Election Day 
of 1774. 

It was a time of turmoil. The Boston tea 
party had made history. A British fleet and 
British troops were on the way to the turbu- 
lent colony. The colonists were greatly 
excited. Gad Hitchcock’s sermon on that 
election day of 1774 did not gloss over the 
inescapable facts. It was a thoroughgoing 
exposition of government and a statement of 
the colonists’ grievances. Governor Hutchin- 
son was of a different temper. He was what 
Ambassador Page, a hundred and thirty-five 
years later, described as one of the Sons of 
the Olive Branch. He did not want even to 
hear the sermon; he wanted to retreat safely 
into the governor’s castle. He was uncom- 
promisingly forced to remain where he be- 
longed, and as Gad Hitchcock preached, he 
turned to the trembling governor and thun- 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 31 


dered, “Let the governor in his chair of state 
hear it, we not only mourn with groanings 
that cannot be uttered, and all because the 
wicked rule. ‘The castle cannot shelter him 
from the searching thunderbolt. . . . King 
George may say the evils which produce this 
state of things are imaginary, but I tell you, 
and I tell the tyrant to his face, it is because 
the wicked rule.” That was not exactly the 
wooing note, but it was fairly well under- 
stood; and that is but an instance, repeated 
again and again, of the fashion in which the 
preacher of that heroic time wrought at the 
structure of the patriotism which was to make 
a nation. 

We shall never let perish the memory of the 
men who fell at Lexington, the first martyrs 
to American democracy; but we have largely 
forgotten that it was the teaching of the Lex- 
ington pulpit which inspired and struck the 
first blow for independence. Jonas Clark, the 
Lexington minister, had feared nothing but 
God and sin; and he had preached a gospel of 
righteousness and fearlessness in politics as 
well as religion. He too was at the battle of 
Lexington ; and when it was over, he saw there 
Jonas Parker, the strongest wrestler of the 
village, who had sworn never to run from Eng- 
lish ball or bayonet, lying dead where he had 


32 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


stood. He saw gray-haired Caleb Monroe 
sprawled out where he had fallen, and Caleb 
Harrington dead on the steps of the church; 
and, looking out at the bodies of these his 
parishioners and personal friends, he saw with 
a prophet’s vision the far issues of that strife 
upon the village green, and said, “From this 
day will be dated the liberty of the world.” 

Sixty-two years later, in another and a raw 
young village in the Middle West, another 
battle was fought to the finish in the same long 
campaign for the liberty which Jonas Clark 
foresaw; when another preacher, Elijah P. 
Lovejoy, after persecutions which might have 
broken the spirit of a regiment, was killed by 
a mob at Alton, Illinois, and by his death won 
in America the freedom of the press. 

Those were fierce, vindictive, lawless days, 
not possible to live through unaffected, not 
easy to remember, after seventy years, without 
partiality and prejudice. But the tumult of 
their passions has long since died to silence; 
and where yonder, in the flaming fifties, were 
battle, massacre and pillage, now the border, 
blossoming with its harvests, throbs to the 
industry of growing cities, rich in patriotism 
that knows no sectional tradition. 

In all this the preacher has had his part. 
It is his voice that rises clearly through those 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 30 


raucous times of mob and violence, giving 
courage to frightened countrysides, and sus- 
taining the spirits of harried towns and settle- 
ments amid the ashes of their calamity and 
the horror of their grief. It was his influence, 
by life and lip, which went far to soften the 
cruelties of those reckless moods that broke 
out in raid and outrage. On both sides the 
line that separated free soil from slave, 
preachers, far apart upon the principle of 
States’ rights but one in loyalty to righteous- 
ness, brought to the conflict of confused and 
bitter politics the claims of conscience and the 
challenge of comparison, and so kept open, 
through the terror of a tragic time, the recon- 
ciling springs of prayer and pity. 

He was also in the thick of the events that 
filled the times of Civil War, when the repub- 
lic rocked upon its foundation and the world 
waited, sometimes in fear, sometimes in hope, 
for its fall. No reference save one need be 
made to those preachers who put on, some the 
Federal uniform and some the Confederate 
gray, without laying off the marks of Christ, 
and marched away in what were then the 
greatest civilian armies the world had seen. 
That one exception is General Leonidas Polk, 
a missionary in spirit, whose record as a 
Southern soldier has left unsullied his char- 


34 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


acter as clergyman and Bishop. But, apart 
from them, the fact remains to be emphasized 
that no reckoning can be made of the sources 
of the strength of that great figure in the 
White House, who held a discordant North to 
its one stupendous labor and, amid the 
antagonisms of war, treason, slander, and 
intrigue, kept his soul unmarred by a single 
unkind passion, unweakened by a published 
doubt; no reckoning can be made of the 
sources of Abraham Lincoln’s strength with- 
out considering the preachers who built 
around him a bulwark of personal counsel and 
reenforcing prayer. Dr. Gurley was one, and 
Bishop Simpson; and there were others, as 
well, who hallowed many a midnight as they 
knelt beside him and encouraged many a day 
as they sustained his spirit. Nor will we for- 
get Joseph Ruggles Wilson in his Augusta 
pulpit on a certain Sunday morning, substi- 
tuting for his sermon the simple announce- 
ment that a great battle was raging in Vir- 
ginia and the forces of the Confederacy were 
suffering from a lack of ammunition. His 
congregation must do its duty and at the close 
of the services the ladies would repair to the 
munition factory to help with the cartridges. 
“You will now rise and sing the Doxology and 
be dismissed.” He will represent those thou- 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 35 


sands of preachers whose practical piety fed 
the streams of Southern devotion, differing 
from all others in that his son was to be Presi- 
dent of a united nation during a more terrible 
conflict than the Civil War. 

It is impossible to omit one other name 
from any just appraisal of the forces that went 
to the saving of the nation: that of Henry 
Ward Beecher, whose was the most command- 
ing single voice in two continents for the cause 
of freedom, righteousness, and inseparable 
union. His distinguished labors in this coun- 
try were crowned by his unprecedented serv- 
ice on the other side of the sea when his series 
of addresses in England on behalf of the North 
and against the recognition of the Confed- 
eracy constituted, as Oliver Wendell Holmes 
said, “a more remarkable embassy than any 
envoy who has represented us in Europe since 
Franklin pleaded the cause of the young 
republic at the Court of Versailles. He kissed 
no royal hand, he talked with no courtly diplo- 
mats, he was the guest of no titled legislator, 
he had no official existence; but through the 
hearts of the people he reached nobles, minis- 
ters, courtiers, the throne itself.” He was a 
preacher! 

Those epic days have passed and America 
will not need such an ambassador again. The 


36 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


rude frontiers are all but gone. But amid 
these different days and their different de- 
mands justice will not allow the long heroic 
tale to be forgotten: that from the first breath 
of freedom which blew the ships of Pilgrims to 
New England shores, through the winds of 
revolution in which an ancient tyranny went 
down, in the storms that swept the separated 
States when the republic had its test in flame 
and blood, the preacher has taken his place 
in American life as a patriot whose courage, 
sacrifice, and labor are unquestioned. From 
sea to sea the continent is in his debt. 

That debt is registered on a third count. 
It is the debt owed to the preacher because of 
the social influences rising in and released 
from his home; because of the children he has 
given to the service of the world. It is an 
often repeated statement that of sixty-three 
names in our American Hall of Fame, ten are 
names of preachers’ children: Bancroft the 
historian, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Clay, 
Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Low- 
ell, S. F. B. Morse, Francis Parkman, and 
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Less than one fifth 
of one per cent of the population have prac- 
tically sixteen per cent of the honors, or 
eighty times their proportionate share. In an 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 37 


issue of England’s Dictionary of National 
Biography a few years ago, 510 names of emi- 
nent men recorded are of sons of lawyers, 350 
are of sons of physicians, and 1,270 are of the 
sons of ministers. It is reported that Who’s 
Who in America for 1924 contains 25,857 
biographies. Eleven per cent or more of the 
names are names of those whose fathers were 
ministers. In proportion to their number in 
the total population of America there are 
twenty-eight times as many preachers’ chil- 
dren reported in Who’s Who as there should 
be. 

The parsonage has its children in honored 
places in every sphere of life. They are beyond 
enumeration, of course; but a few selected 
names will suggest the debt which society 
owes the preacher on this count. In science 
the children of the ministry are represented 
by Agassiz, Jenner, Field, Morse, Romanes, 
the Wrights; in history by Bancroft, Park- 
man, Hallam, Froude, Sloane, Muller; in art 
by Joshua Reynolds, and Christopher Wren; 
in literature by Jonson, Addison, Cowper, 
Goldsmith, Coleridge, Keble, Young, Tenny- 
son, Arnold, Kingsley, Jane Austen, Charlotte 
Bronté and her sisters, Henry James, Stephen 
Crane, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Steele; 
in philosophy by William James; in modern 


38 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


politics by Governor Morton, Senator Dolliver, 
Senator Beveridge; in jurisprudence by Jus- 
tices Field and Brewer and Justice, now Sec- 
retary Hughes; in music by Reginald DeKoven 
and Louise Homer. Four sons of preachers 
have occupied the White House, Presidents 
Buchanan, Arthur, Cleveland, and Wilson; 
and seven of the mistresses of the White 
House have been preachers’ daughters. 
These may represent the service which the 
preacher has given to society through his chil- 
dren; but that service is not accomplished 
only in the eminent and noted of them. It has 
been as real, though unrecognized, in the 
nameless and unknown men who pushed back 
the frontier and in places heretofore waste 
builded cities, societies, schools, and the ideals 
and institutions of an enlarging culture. They 
have wrought their spirit into the structure 
of national life. Colleges are monuments to 
their vision and sacrifice, churches are the 
product of their lonely labor. Their children 
have wakened the strings of enduring song 
and had part in the nobler literature of the 
world. They have been voices of righteous- 
ness in Senate chambers and cabinets of state. 
They have mastered space by electric com- 
munication, conquered the air in flying craft, 
and penetrated the secrets of nature for a 


IN AMERICAN LIFE 39 


hundred uses. The sons of preachers have 
been summoned to kings’ counsels and have 
sat in presidents’ chairs; their daughters have 
been examples to a social world. The honor 
of the service is no empty phrase when applied 
to the Christian ministry. It has a noble and 
unique tradition of pioneers, patriots, pro- 
tagonists of culture, whose lives, whose labors, 
whose illimitable devotion, whose deaths, have 
been the inextricable glory of three hundred 
American years. 


CHAPTER II 


THE PREACHER AS THE INTERPRETER 
OF HIS AGE 


In the final address which Silvester Horne 
delivered in his series on the Lyman Beecher 
Foundation at Yale University, he remarked 
that “the danger of lectures that deal mainly 
with the past is that the final impression 
should be left, that our own time is in the 
nature of an anti-climax to the illustrious 
generations we have been passing in review; 
that the great gates leading into the spacious 
lands of opportunity are all closed, and that 
nothing remains to us, but some shabby and 
petty doors giving upon meager and uninter- 
esting fields.”! It would not be surprising if 
Some such impression had been left by the 
preceding pages; but nothing could be farther 
from the actual truth. As Silvester Horne 
in the same address urged upon his audience 
that ‘the work of the preacher in modern 
times remains as romantic and dramatic as 
ever,” so the chapters which follow aim to 
make clear that the opportunity of the modern 


1Horne: The Romance of Preaching, p. 265. Used by permission of 
Fleming H. Revell Company, publishers. 


40 


AS INTERPRETERS 41 


preacher, his influence and his responsibility, 
are as great as, if not greater than they have 
ever been before. 

For the age in which the preacher lives 
to-day marshals a procession of magnitudes, 
alike sublime and sinister, such as were never 
before present in a single period. In order 
to parallel the first quarter of this twentieth 
century one must bring together nearly all the 
nineteen centuries which have gone before. 

Describing the present age from one point 
of view, an observer will remark the crumbling 
of authority, the increasing disregard of law, 
the sudden rise to social and political posi- 
tion of men without training in either culture 
or citizenship or intelligent respect for public 
interest, but whose claim to deference rests 
wholly upon the millions they have been able 
to accumulate by accident or cunning. Such 
an observer will take account of an invasion 
of the older domestic sanctities, a prurience 
of fiction and an emptiness and indecency of 
the drama, an erraticalness in contemporary 
music and an eroticism in contemporary 
amusements. He will recognize, accordingly, 
as in a rescript, the decay and disaster of the 
Roman civilization marked, as it was, by the 
same decrepitude of the elder institutions, the 
same emptiness of literature and feebleness of 


42 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


art, the same failure of authority in religion 
and the state alike. This is an age of the 
natural sciences rather than of classical cul- 
ture; but in the eagerness of the modern mind 
to explore and master the forces of nature, in 
the response of the modern mood to the chal- 
lenge of new facts, one can feel the beat of 
that inquiring and courageous spirit which, 
five hundred years ago, burst its ancient re- 
straints and blossomed in the Renaissance. 
In the revolt of the contemporary mind from 
elder religious forms and complacencies, in 
the widespread inquisition which has searched 
and stung the church, in the present-day 
assault upon traditional dogma, in the discon- 
tent with religious forms; it needs no special 
discernment to recognize the movement of the 
modern mind which has been well termed 
“Toward a New Reformation.” In the more 
clamorous social, industrial, and political fer- 
ment, in the disorder and violence which, from 
time to time, menaces alike stability of gov- 
ernment and permanence of social institu- 
tions; one hears again the mobs that marched 
for justice behind John Ball and Wat the tyler 
in the England of 13881. The ferocity of 
princes may be a forgotten evil, but the sever- 
ity of an industrial system is a living expe- 
rience; and no thoughtful mind, whether sym- 


AS INTERPRETERS 43 


pathetic or not, can blind itself to the signifi- 
cance and peril of the social resentment burn- 
ing beneath the surface of events. 

To all of this must be added the obvious 
statement that the age in which the modern 
preacher has his place is a time of wonders 
compared to which the miracles of the Scrip- 
tures seem almost small. Since 1900 the hori- 
zons of the world seem to have fallen out, and 
in the realms opened to the exploring intellect, 
in the apprehension of forces hitherto unsus- 
pected, in the reaction of discovery upon our 
thought of the universe and life and God; we 
are face to face with the infinite. As Bishop 
Charles D. Williams has said, “We are living 
in one of those supreme crises of history when 
the long, slow processes of the world’s life 
focus to a burning point and bring on their 
own judgment.’* The dimensions of such a 
time as this, as indeed of any period, its char- 
acter and spirit, are indications of the 
demands which it makes upon both institu- 
tions and men; and to no man does it present 
such obligations or offer such opportunities 
as to the preacher. He is to-day, as in the 
hour of his greatest service in the past, the 
interpreter of his age. 





2 Williams: The Prophetic Ministry for Today, p. 69. Reprinted by 
permission of the Macmillan Company. 


44 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


There are other interpretative voices of vary- 
ing degrees of authenticity; among which it 
' may be well to note the newspaper. The news- 
paper offers primarily no interpretation of the 
day; it presents only a review of its events, 
and a review seen from any of a score of not 
unprejudiced points of view, and restated 
often with something quite other than the 
simple desire to present an accurate survey 
of the human scene. One cannot always get 
even the news from a newspaper; he may need 
almost a sheaf of them. To look for an 
accurate account of labor aims and grievances 
in papers controlled by large syndicates or 
rich individuals; to expect honest expositions 
of the progress of moral reform and of the 
enforcement of locally unpopular laws from 
any but a few outstanding exceptions to the 
newspaper average; to anticipate even an 
intelligent treatment of educational and reli- 
gious enterprises from journals which habitu- 
ally assign inexperienced or poorly educated 
reporters to discuss matters projected and 
maintained by highly specialized minds, is a 
futile search. It goes without saying that 
what has just been said involves no charge of 
malice on the part of the newspapers and those 
who produce them. From the nature of the 
case they are what they are. “The function 


AS INTERPRETERS 45 


of news is to signalize an event, the function 
of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, 
to set them into relation with each other, and 
make a picture of reality on which men can 
act.”> Nevertheless, though the days have 
passed in which the pronouncements of a 
Greeley and Dana and Watterson and Bowles 
formed the opinions and directed the judg- 
ments of almost a nation, the impact of edi- 
torial thinking to-day must not be underesti- 
mated. Only it must be appraised with an 
understanding of its inherent and avowed pur- 
pose. The newspaper signalizes events, it 
does not make a picture of reality; and to 
supplement personal observation with such 
expositions as Owen Sinclair’s The Brass 
Check, and Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, 
is to appreciate the seriousness of the situa- 
tion in which the newspaper is one of the most 
insubordinate factors of common life as it is 
engaged in the higher enterprises of expe- 
rience. 

The greater literary magazines may more 
nearly claim a place as interpreters of their 
times. Reviewing, not so much contemporary 
events as the directions and reactions of 
thought produced by those events, their edi- 





3’ Lippmann: Public Opinion, p. 358. Used by permission of Harcourt, 
Brace and Company, publishers. 


46 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


torial minds sit high above the spume of things 
in which the newspaper lives, and offer calm 
and reasoned definition of the ferment which 
makes up so much of life. The defect which 
defeats their purpose is that they sit too high. 
One can paraphrase Tennyson and say that to 
our question, out of the ruck of things, is 
there any hope? their answers 


“. .. peal from that high land, 
But in a tongue few men can understand.” 


With still more show of reason, perhaps, 
claim is made for other voices that they truly 
interpret the times amid which they speak. 
It is made for the scientists, and not a few 
scientists are making it for themselves. It is 
being made for experts, here and there, in 
some specialized and restricted knowledge, in 
laboratories and college chairs. But no mind 
which gives itself to a separated department 
of intelligence, however vital and popularized 
that department may be, can interpret an age 
in which meet and mingle so many and~so 
varied streams of knowledge, experience, dis- 
covery, and revolt. 

These several forms of expression have been 
thus named in order to make more evident, by 
comparison and contrast, that no matter how 
favorable one’s judgment may be as to the 


AS INTERPRETERS 47 


contribution which they bring and the service 
they render to the age’s understanding of 
itself, theirs is nevertheless the defect of 
inherent limitations. 

For there are three qualifications which are 
indispensable to an interpreter. First, he 
must be familiar with that which he under- 
takes to interpret. His must be a broad and 
eclectic understanding; and while to such a 
mind the intricate and recondite details of 
fact may be not wholly known, yet, just as 
one may be able to translate the [liad into 
living English without being competent to 
write a history of the Greek particles, so one 
may understand the spirit, passion, aims, and 
limitations of a period without having spe- 
cialized in the ever-changing and remote par- 
ticularizations of detailed interests. To few 
men indeed is given the opportunity of such 
general familiarity with his times as is given 
to the preacher. An editor like Godwin, of the 
earlier Nation, may find himself in the thick 
of things-in-general, but no more so than the 
preacher. Preaching has been and still is con- 
sidered a narrow occupation by those who 
derive their opinions from impulses rather 
than facts; and, of course, it can be made so 
and has been made so. Even then it would 
be difficult to make it narrower than some of 


48 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


those who criticize its limitations have been 
able to make their interests. But the intelli- 
gent preacher finds that the world is his 
mental parish; and nothing which concerns 
humanity fails to affect him. No other occu- 
pation involves, in what may be called its 
technic, an acquaintance with the entire life of 
society. Ever so many wars may be imagined 
between science and religion, if one’s imagina- 
tion is peculiarly vivid, but one cannot imagine 
a fact, a doctrine or a discovery or a claim 
of science which does not impinge at once 
upon the interest of the preacher. Every 
enlargement of human knowledge amplifies the 
conception of God. No conception of God can 
remain unchanged through a generation, even 
through a decade of such achievements and 
events as the past decade has witnessed, and 
be a true conception. The words that vibrate 
across a continent, becoming vocal through 
the radio, give new significance to the voice 
that breathed o’er Eden. Bergson’s Vital Im- 
pulse plunging through the stuff of things adds 
inquiry and reenforcement to the preacher’s 
exposition of the immanence of God. The 
radio-activities of certain recently separated 
elements must surely affect the hypothesis of 
personal continuity on which the preacher 
builds the inferences which join with revela- 


AS INTERPRETERS 49 


tion to support our faith in immortality. 

The preacher’s obligation to know life goes 
further. It may still seem religious and wise, in 
some quarters, to declare that the pulpit must 
avoid politics; but in an age when the demo- 
cratic ideal is invading every province of 
thought and conduct and organization, no 
preacher can, if he would, keep his mind free 
or his utterances clear of the democratic mood. 
No intelligent preacher will; for democracy, 
while it is the most dangerous and difficult 
enterprise of human relationship, is neverthe- 
less inescapable. It is the test of intelligent 
life; and the preacher’s vocation demands of 
him such familiarity not alone with the shib- 
boleths of society, but with the facts of social 
experience and mood and purpose, that he 
may speak convincingly to men and women 
who constantly face those facts. He has to be 
immersed in the immediate because it is to 
men likewise immersed that he has to speak, 
not as if they occupied the social setting of 
the first century, but as actually participat- 
ing in the multitudinous drama of the twen- 
tieth century. The preacher of to-day dare 
not be unfamiliar with whatever other streams 
may water the intellectual and social expe- 
rience of his age. Literature, art, industry, 
the games men play, the amusements which 


50 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


engage them, the deceptions by which they 
are lured into the twilight zones of serious- 
ness—all of these illumine the preacher’s 
ideas, discipline his convictions, sustain his 
sense of duty, and again and again open the 
springs from which derive his vital experi- 
ences. In a word, the preacher is the only 
man whose vocation coincides with human 
experience, whose specialty is the broadest 
culture, and who is the more effective master 
of his specific field as he is more thoroughly at 
home with the widest generalizations of 
knowledge. 

He is the conservator of society’s better 
appreciations. In medicine the public pays 
high honor to the consulting specialist; but 
the health of the community depends upon the 
general practitioner. His skill, his knowledge, 
his precision of judgment increase with the 
advancing wisdom of the specialist from 
whom he takes counsel; but he himself, not 
the specialist, is the conservator of the public 
health. It is not otherwise with the preacher. 
The public gives high honor to the scholar, 
to the ecclesiastical administrator, to the 
director of particularized social enterprises. 
But the moral and ethical health of society 
depends upon the preacher, whose vision 
includes, whose insight appraises, and whose 


AS INTERPRETERS 51 


intelligence, touched with that emotion we are 
learning is so necessary in the comprehension 
of life, interprets the age to itself. 

For the preacher posseses, to a greater 
degree than any other man, a second qualifi- 
cation indispensable to the interpreter of his 
age. He is not only familiar with the cur- 
rents of the age which is to be interpreted ; he 
has broad and intimate personal contacts with 
those to whom the interpretation is to be 
made. As he sits at the center of human 
knowledge, so he moves at the heart of human 
experience. 

Senator William E. Borah, in one of his 
public addresses, now appearing in book form, 
said of Abraham Lincoln, that he possessed in 
a remarkable way the capacity for intellectual 
solitude, even in the midst of the throng—yet 
he never lost faith in the throng. A recent 
reviewer, quoting that remark, contrasts Sen- 
ator Borah with Lincoln whom he eulogizes, 
and points one of the qualities which seems 
to rise like an impalpable but fatal barrier 
between Senator Borah and the American 
people whom he so sincerely serves. The 
reviewer says, “While admiring the intellec- 
tual honesty and the humane principles of 
such a man, it is possible to lay down this 
record of his speeches and wonder if he has 


52 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


ever been moved greatly by human con- 
tacts?” 

The preacher, by his very vocation, is 
moved greatly by human contacts; and it is in 
this light that one has to see the pastoral 
aspect of the preacher’s life. Too much has 
been made in the rather sentimental appraisals 
of the ministry, of the quite negligible fact 
that, with few exceptions, the preacher’s life is 
a pilgrimage upon the earth, denied the domes- 
tic securities and happy routine which gather 
around permanent firesides and an unchang- 
ing circle of acquaintanceship and friends. 
That, of course, is in a measure true; but 
entirely too little attention has been given the 
fact that wherever he is, the preacher is never 
on the circumference of the social scene, but 
always at the center. If where he sits is not 
always the head of the table, he is always a 
good way above the salt. His associations are 
restricted by no custom, conventionality, social 
standards, trade or professional surroundings. 
He dare do all that may become a man. There 
are few other men and women in the actual 
life of the world whose associations and con- 
tacts are not largely carried on in specialized 
and standardized atmospheres. Their knowl- 
edge of and familiarity with other men and 
women narrow quite naturally to clearly dif- 


AS INTERPRETERS 53 


ferentiated and constant limitations, of trade, 
of litigation, of ill health, of administration, 
of mass labor, of the classroom. Only within 
very small groups of personal friendships do 
they meet and feel the more authentic and per- 
sonal experience upon which beats the impact 
of those great and intimate realities which 
make the mystery, the majesty, the glory of 
life. But it is in those impacts that the 
preacher finds his vocation most effective. In 
him occupation and experience coincide. One 
of Charlotte Bronté’s heroines, after some dis- 
turbing episode, is made to say that she still 
felt life at life’s sources. It is at its sources 
that the preacher lives with life. It is his 
word which begins the home, transforming the 
beauty of happy but untested fellowship and 
confident but untried love into that grave 
adventure of affection which we call the 
domestic life. It is the preacher who touches 
home life with a new and subtle emotion as, 
through the rites of the church, he brings to 
infancy an eternal meaning and informs the 
family relationship with inescapable responsi- 
bility. It is the preacher who walks a thou- 
sand times through the valley of the shadow 
and by the strange contagions of the human 
spirit is enabled to reinforce bewildered men 
and women with courage and hope and that 


54 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


tranquillity of mind which makes of suffering 
a discipline instead of a desert. It is the 
preacher to whom, as to no other, men and 
women, regardless of time, place, position, or 
character, turn amid their tragedies of sor- 
row; and he, as no other, finds himself at home 
in the presence of death. 

The significance of this close association in 
the intimate and crucial experiences of men, 
is not simply that the preacher has these con- 
tacts, but that these contacts disclose to him 
the actual and determining mind of his age. 
From them he knows the swift upspringing of 
his generation’s doubt from the constant dark- 
ness of great calamity and unassuaged grief. 
He knows the reaction of these fundamental 
experiences toward the enunciation of reli- 
gious views, and can appraise the force of the 
liberal appeal compared with that of tradi- 
tional belief. He knows the groping wistful- 
ness, the passionate anarchy of minds on 
whom the human storm has broken, as no one 
else can know it. At the same time he has 
access to the more militant life of his day. He 
mingles on even terms with men as they work 
and play, puts his mind along with theirs in 
their individual enterprises and cooperative 
undertakings; and whether it be the Odyssey 
of a gifted intelligence or the lament of 


AS INTERPRETERS 55 


troubled ignorance, whether it be the vivid 
story of successful wealth or the short and 
simple annals of the poor, it is the preacher 
who has opportunity to read at first hand the 
intellectual and spiritual biography of the 
generation to which the age is to be inter- 
preted. Browning flings up to his “Sordello” 
the admonition, 


“Thou hast 
Life, then—wilt challenge life for us.” 


It is that high obligation—higher still, that 
privilege—which belongs to the preacher as 
to no other man. He has life; lives at life’s 
sources; as the Greek maxim has it, looks on 
death and will start at no shadows. So, then, 
he challenges life for all others. It was Mrs. 
Humphry Ward who wrote that “the man 
who loves this poor human life of ours, with- 
out ever being fooled by it, ... has a rare 
place among us.”* She did not intend and 
surely would not have acknowledged the fact, 
but she was nevertheless describing the 
preacher. For this is a summary of the quali- 
ties inhering in his vocation and, ultimately, 
in his character, which make him the inter- 
preter of his age. He loves life without being 
fooled by it. 





4Ward: A Writer’s Recollections, vol. ii; p. 124. Used by permission 
of Harper & Brothers, publishers. 


56 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


The preacher loves life without being fooled 
by it because of his possession of a third indis- 
pensable requisite for an interpreter: he is 
dominated by an impregnable and impartial 
principle of interpretation. No preacher in 
modern times has exercised a wider and more 
effective influence over his age and place than 
did Robert W. Dale, of Birmingham. He was 
the leader of English nonconformity. A mas- 
ter of theology, popular, eloquent and com- 
manding in the pulpit, he was also the voice of 
political action and the inspiration of social 
morality on many a platform and in many a 
conflict. Dead for thirty years, he is still 
speaking in British and American thought. 
The secret of his personality and his power 
has been given by Dr. 8S. Parkes Cadman, that 
he saw earthly affairs in the light of the Eter- 
nal. In a course of lectures upon some of the 
great English thinkers, Doctor Cadman also 
diagnosed what he called the structural defi- 
ciency in Huxley’s mental nature, as “the 
absence of those adventurous tentacles which 
grope for the spiritual meaning of phe- 
nomena.’”® There may be few or many to-day 
from whose mental nature those adventurous 
tentacles which grope for the spiritual mean- 





5Cadman: Charles Darwin and Other English Thinkers, p. 71. Used 
by permission of Congregational Publishing Society. 


AS INTERPRETERS 57 


ing of phenomena are absent, but the vast 
majority of men and women, quite to the con- 
trary, are earnestly or instinctively feeling 
after the spiritual significance of life and its 
events. Against all the economic explanations 
of history, recently so popular, put a volume 
like Professor Shailer Mathews’ Spiritual 
Interpretation of History. Beside the agnos- 
tic and materialistic expositions of modern 
science place Professor Thompson’s Spiritual 
Interpretation of Nature, or Hudson’s The 
Truths We Live By, or Science and Human 
Affairs, by Professor Curtis. Balance Ber- 
trand Russell’s pessimism and Professor 
Dewey’s materialism, the teaching of Irwin 
Edman and Everett Dean Martin—noting the 
unintentional wistfulness in their attempts to 
find altruistic purposes for life so hopeless 
as they declare its outlook to be—with the 
writings of Josiah Royce or Paul Elmer More’s 
studies of Plato. It will be difficult not to 
recognize the accuracy of A. J. Balfour’s 
remark: “I doubt,’ he said, “whether there 
has been for generations a deeper interest than 
at this moment in things spiritual—however 
different may be its manifestations from those 
with which we are familiar in history.’ 





Balfour: Thetsm and Humanism, p. 25. Reprinted by permission of 
the publishers, the George H. Doran Company. 


58 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


One of the characteristic phrases of the reli- 
gious vocabulary of a generation ago—that 
fine and figurative vocabulary of the circuit 
rider and the evangelist—was to the effect that 
the preacher stood between the living and the 
dead calling men to God. It isa phrase and a 
figure born of that older, individualistic con- 
ception of religion and evangelism, as accurate 
in its insight as it was expressive in its form. 
That older individualistic conception has been 
greatly modified, but the strategic position of 
the preacher has not altered; it has been given 
wider ranges. He stands in the same place, 
surrounded by the same inheritances of a great 
spiritual tradition, between a living society 
and social orders dead and dying, calling his 
day to the recognition of its own spiritual 
values, the spiritual implications of its events. 

It need hardly be said that not all preachers 
have consistently done this; but this has been 
and remains their privilege, their opportunity, 
their obligation. Mr. Walter Lippmann has 
made a very suggestive criticism in his remark 
that the churches “come down to us with a 
tradition that the great things are permanent 
and they meet a population that needs above 
all to understand the meaning of change.’’* 





7Lippmann: Public Opinion, p. 155. Used by permission of Harcourt 
Brace and Company, publishers. 


AS INTERPRETERS 59 


Our generation, for instance, not alone the 
more specially trained intelligences but the 
popular mind as well, has been so invaded by 
the influences of modern science that it is con- 
fused, distracted, hesitant toward inferences 
which only color thought where it had been 
swift in conclusions that affected life itself. 
The passion of democracy, which has swept 
all fields of enterprise and intelligence, has 
become a flame in which institutions, tradi- 
tions, faiths, and orders alike seem ready to 
dissolve. A fierce loyalty to truth, a demand 
for reality in those adventures of the spirit 
where reality is most necessary, but where, 
heretofore, it has been too easily taken for 
granted, has brought the most cherished 
beliefs, the most sacred formulas, to a relent- 
less and searching scrutiny. History, religion 
and experience have been sternly summoned 
to present sound reasons for every hope they 
have presumed to lift before the wistful minds 
of men, until the age seems to question and 
to suspect the foundations on which its fore- 
bears reared the solemn structure of their 
faith and worship, and multitudes of men and 
women, in the language of the great Greek but 
with nothing of his spirit, carry a threaten- 
ing shadow in their heart under the full sun- 
shine. And all of this uncertainty of outlook, 


60 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


this bewilderment of feeling, this skepticism 
of good, rises within the experience of political 
tragedy which turned the continent of historic 
culture into a land of famine, madness, and 
despair, confirmed the cynical remark that 
the “history of the human race is the diary 
of a Bear Garden,” and disclosed beneath the 
surface of our latest civilization the ancient 
savageries of cunning, cruelty, and selfish- 
ness unchanged except in the employment of 
greater instruments for vaster holocausts than 
savagery has hitherto possessed. 

It is well to face these sinister facts of 
present-day life, for they are the facts which 
the preacher faces, and they declare in no 
uncertain definitions what religion dare not 
be and what he must undertake. “Of all the 
interpretations of the Christian religion,” as 
Professor Jacks has written, “there are few 
so false and none so worthless as those which 
reduce it to a wash of rose color spread over 
the dark realities of the world, or to a group 
of fancies in which the soul of man, knowing 
them to be untrue, takes a deceitful holiday 
from the burden and the tragedy of life.’’§ 

These are the facts of life; these are the 
facts which the preacher faces; they consti- 





8Jacks: The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion, p. 9. Reprinted 
by permission of the publishers, the George H. Doran Company. 


AS INTERPRETERS 61 


tute the stream of change which the age needs 
to understand in connection with its tradition 
of the great permanences. The preacher, as 
no other man, faces them with a principle of 
interpretation which alone can inform them 
with constructive, sustaining, and purposeful 
meaning. He sees earthly affairs in the light 
of eternity. 

Walter Pater has written of Marius, the 
Epicurean, that to him the whole of life 
seemed full of sacred presences. To the 
preacher, responsive to the age, aware of all 
of its mighty moods and menaces, life is full 
of sacred presences. Amid its tumult of intel- 
ligence and passion, of knowledge and agnos- 
ticism, of pessimism and strange, indomitable 
hope, he sees the achievements of men, the 
forces they have mastered, the truths they 
have established, the sufferings they endure, 
the high desires that elude their definitions, 
the mighty hopes that make them men, not as 
ends in themselves, finished business, but dis- 
ciplining and prophetic presences moving 
through the solemn tragedy and pomp of time 
like the figures Dante saw on their way to the 
enduring light. His is the responsibility and 
the power to present the new disclosures of 
science which astonish and affright, in their 
true perspective, so that, however they may 


62 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


disrupt old forms of faith they shall but 
amplify the realities which those forms tried, 
in their day of acceptance, to express. His 
is the principle and the application by which 
the passion of democracy is revealed as truly 
springing, not from inheritances of a common 
equality, but from the enduement of a com- 
mon obligation. His it is to discern for men, 
and thus teach them a new discernment, that 
the realities of faith and the spirit are not 
imprisoned in perishable documents, deliver- 
ances or Scriptures, but are at one with that 
vast truth which is of the very life of God, 
“into which we have been gathered and in 
which we share.” His it is to reiterate to his 
age, in ever-changing forms of speech, in ever- 
changing applications to events, but in the 
simple continuity of the truth which liberates, 
that “to make us spiritually were the first 
beginnings of thought, the making of alpha- 
bets, the making of literatures, the struggles 
of patriots, the death of martyrs, the crea- 
tions of genius, the researches of science, the 
whole age-long struggle of the world.”® His 
it is to make clear and plain that the age in 
which his generation lives and labors and is 
confused is but the latest stage in that increas- 





_ *Brierly: Religion and Today, p.135. Used by permission of Congre- 
gational Publishing Society, publishers. 


AS INTERPRETERS 63 


ing procession of purpose, and it is his privi- 
lege and opportunity to see to it that the 
thoughts of the men of his time are widened 
with the process of the suns. He challenges 
life for his contemporaries. He interprets it 
in terms of the Eternal. Out of its hurts and 
contradictions and mysteries, he discloses to 
them those dear and solemn beauties of affec- 
tion, of truth, of duty, and of hope, which at 
once chasten and sustain the mind. He uncoy- 
ers at the heart of life’s bewilderments and 
battle those “things of the spirit which, though 
they disturb men, yet when they are rever- 
enced, yield a lively and a constant joy.”?° 


Cadman: Ambassadors of God, p. 23. Reprinted by permission of 
the Macmillan Company, publishers. 


Tit 


THE PREACHER IN THE DIRECTION 
OF SOCIAL REFORM 


ONE of the reflections suggested by the first 
chapter in this volume is that the pioneer is 
surely the one figure which has now passed 
from American life. To read a book like Pro- 
fessor Turner’s The Frontier in American His- 
tory is to see the march of a nation across the 
continent, and to realize the immeasurable 
debt which our day owes those intrepid spirits 
who transformed a wilderness into an empire, 
punctuating the record of their heroic enter- 
prise with many a nameless grave. But that 
old pioneering life now remains only in the 
pages of a history too dull ever to disclose the 
passion that burned at the heart of the pio- 
neer. Something of its color may still flame 
dimly through the imagination of novelists, 
from Washington Irving to Emerson Hough; 
but itself is gone. With the frontier has gone 
as well the epic figure of the frontier preacher, 
true son of an heroic age. Asbury, Peter 
Cartwright, William Taylor, representatives 
of the frontier at three main stages, loom 

64 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 65 


gigantic down the years; but they have left no 
successors since Van Orsdel and Iliff crossed 
the final range. To-day is a day of social com- 
monplace. 

But there is another aspect of this matter 
which needs be held in mind. The geographi- 
cal frontier is gone, but is there no equivalent? 
The frontiersman of history and romance has 
had his day. The pioneer preacher, with his 
rough speech and ready arm, foregathers now 
with those kindred spirits of a vanished past. 
Where he rode his faithful horse, his succes- 
sor drives a Ford; and where the outcasts of 
Poker Flat died amid the snow-bound pines, 
forgotten by their isolated world, other men 
and women around whom half a century of 
science has gathered a hundred luxuries, by 
radio enjoy at their discretion the informa- 
tion, eloquence, and music of the pleasant 
cities scattered across three thousand miles. 
From one end of the continent to another, 
from the metropolis to which the world pays 
tribute, to the settlement amid the mountain 
gorges, modern invention, modern science, 
modern transportation, have standardized 
food, clothing, literature, and amusements. 

But through these commonplaces which 
have thus leveled life to a conventional com- 
fort there runs another frontier; as challeng- 


66 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


ing as the old, more difficult to transform and 
infinitely more dangerous to ignore. It is that 
frontier of industrial and social estimate by 
which the community or the commonwealth 
attempts to appraise the meaning of its social 
conditions, to remedy and remove its social 
discontents. On that frontier there is more 
room than ever for the pioneering mind; for 
that frontier is almost as various as human 
life. Heresy and orthodoxy in social theory, 
as Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin put it, “are mat- 
ters of latitude and longitude.” “A social 
outlook that is traditional in Kansas, is con- 
ventional in Chicago, progressive in Roches- 
ter, and anarchistic in the financial centers 
along the Atlantic seaboard.” 

This variableness in the social frontier, 
these differing estimates put upon social con- 
ditions, must not be permitted to obscure the 
significance of the conditions themselves, which 
call for wise appraisal, or to blind men to the 
fact that hitherto the application of remedies 
has seemed only to result in the increase of 
social discontent. One of the discoveries now 
being made even by those most averse to such 
discovery is that the social ferment of the 
time is no mild disturbance simmering in the 





1Coffin: In a Day of Social Rebuslding, p. 46. Used by permission of 
Yale University Press. 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 67 


gradual warmth of untrained minds habitu- 
ated, through generations of labor and disad- 
vantage, to the status quo. It is a threaten- 
ing menace, fired by passions that flame with 
the fierce heat of long-accumulated injustices, 
long-deferred hopes, long-betrayed confidence, 
long-thwarted political aspirations, and now 
kindled to fresh and constant vigor by a new 
and inflammatory sense of power. It is being 
fed, also, from the selfishness, ignorance, and 
malice of not a few foreign-born disturbers of 
the economic peace who are social rebels for 
profit, landless and homeless by choice, heed- 
less of the admonitions of the past and reck- 
less of the possibilities of the future. 

What has just been remarked might seem 
to be too emphatic a reference to the indus- 
trial discontent of the time; but it must be 
remembered that it is in the area of industrial 
relationships and organization that the 
present social and political order will be vin- 
dicated, transformed, or done away. Around 
this industrial emergency gather the various 
institutions of society, its remedial and cor- 
rective enterprises which, taken together, con- 
stitute the machineries of the social problem 
and comprise the field for social reform. 

If illustration is needed it is close at hand. 
Here, for instance, is the enterprise of 


68 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


public charity, involving almost incredible 
amounts of money, engaging the life-work of 
a host of trained men and women who com- 
bine personal qualities of the highest order 
with an earnestness and social patience almost 
religious in their devotion. They are becom- 
ing more and more expert in searching the 
last details of social and individual experience 
and character in an effort, not alone to 
remedy, but to prevent the avoidable misfor- 
tunes which are yet unhappily so common. 
Likewise upon this social frontier and not 
unidentified with industrial discontent, are 
the courts. No one will deny that they have 
created deep resentments by their mainte- 
nance of old injustices, by the expensiveness 
of judicial processes, and by the development 
and defense of intricate and unnecessary 
forms which seem to operate chiefly in the 
interests of overnumerous officials, employees, 
and attorneys. Theodore Roosevelt stated it 
mildly when he remarked that there is a 
tendency in the law toward the deification of 
technicalities. Rufus Choate’s observation 
was more biting. He said, as Thomas Went- 
worth Higginson remembered his conversa- 
tion, that the law “was a series of fossil injus- 
tices or petty maneuvers—like hare hunting 
in England, splendid horses and men, dogs 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 69 


with pedigrees of centuries, and when all is 
done it is only a rabbit.’ 

Not so clearly recognized but no less actu- 
ally involved, the malefactions of politics and 
government have their place in this social 
frontier. Lord Fisher, that great British sea- 
man, is reported as saying that the politicians 
had deepened his faith in Providence. But 
whatever they have done for Lord Fisher, they 
have not deepened the faith of the average 
man in the practical values of democracy. 
In the ramifications of politics and the opera- 
tions of government itself, the plain man can- 
not help discerning that property is too gen- 
erally given precedence over human life, and 
financial investments seem more faithfully 
protected than the rights of personality. 

The claims and enterprises of public health 
and morals must also be mentioned as forming 
part of this unavoidable frontier. They 
involve the community in responsibilities in 
respect of homes, of wages adequate for decent 
living, of restrictions upon the employment of 
children in gainful occupations, of censorship 
of public amusements, of police protection, 
and the eradication, or the tolerance, of public 
vice. 





2 Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 71. Used 
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers. 


70 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


All these and others which readily occur to 
mind are enterprises indigenous to every com- 
munity, variously appraised, but constantly 
dealt with; the influences of which, in one 
way or another, impinge upon every life 
within the community. These institutions, 
enterprises, and the exigencies out of which 
they rise, comprise the field of social reform, 
the social frontier from which derive the con- 
stant discontents, the sense of social failure, 
and the demands which greaten with the days, 
for such profound and structural changes in 
the organization of society as will amount to 
almost a new social order. 

What direction those demands will take is 
yet in the balance. To discern and wisely to 
control them constitute the insistent obliga- 
tion resting upon society itself and particu- 
larly upon those minds to which have been 
given something of social insight and a sense 
of social responsibility. Two possible direc- 
tions are already to be discovered. On the one 
hand there are those who look upon the 
present social order as they might look upon a 
well-used car. They recall the service it has 
rendered; the happy generations it has car- 
ried prosperously upon the road of time 
since Adam Smith published The Wealth of 
Nations and James Watt invented the con- 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 71 


densing steam engine. They cannot forget 
that the wealth which has gone into popular 
education, into state and church and inde- 
pendent universities and colleges, into hos- 
pitals, libraries, public parks and recreational 
endowments, into museums of art and arche- 
ology; the wealth which has created the great 
highways, developed the natural resources of 
the country, and made possible the evolution 
and enjoyment of modern comfort and pros- 
perity ; has all been brought to us in this well- 
used social order. They regard it, accord- 
ingly, not only with traditional interest, but 
with something of affection; and they consider 
its present condition with an eye to conserva- 
tion rather than to change. It is defective, 
they admit. It is badly worn. It needs new 
parts and the readjustment of the old. But 
all it needs is repairs. A new transmission 
rod, perhaps; new spark plugs, it may be; 
a new oiling system, and, by all means, new 
brake bands—then the machine will be as 
good as new. That is the attitude of many 
minds alike familiar with the past and alive 
to the present and with no lack of intelligence 
toward the social future. 

On the other hand there are those, by no 
means less intelligent or energetic, who see 
the social order as a car which is not merely 


72 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


well worn, but completely worn out. They 
see the cost of the wealth it has carried, the 
toll which its organization of industry takes 
in limb and life. They see the waste in the 
capitalistic system. They appreciate indus- 
trialism’s by-product in personal, political, 
and social tragedy. No amount of repairs 
seems to them to promise any good. They see 
the need, not for tinkering, but for entire 
transformation. It is not the accessories that 
are at fault, they say, it is the engine; and 
they would abandon the old car and get one 
altogether new. Their hope for the world is 
not in social amelioration but in social revolu- 
tion. 

Which direction is to be followed, and on 
either, what specific steps are to be taken, 
what modifications wrought in society, what 
repairs are to be initiated, or what kind of 
new machinery is to be procured, are ques- 
tions which lie beyond the scope of this chap- 
ter. This social emergency which, in one form 
or another, is always confronting society, has 
been briefiy sketched at this point in order to 
fix attention upon the fact that in the direc- 
tion of social reform for which the emergency 
calls, the preacher occupies a strategic place, 
when it becomes felt and clearly recognized. 

This is not to say that the preacher has 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 73 


always exercised the influence inherent in his 
position, or that when he has exercised it, he 
has done so wisely. Too frequently he has 
been little more than “a half-hearted meddler 
in great affairs.” One of the less happy 
records which history is compelled to acknowl- 
edge is of the indifference of the church to 
social reform, its tardiness of sympathy and, 
sometimes, its quickness of opposition when 
ideals and activities toward the practical im- 
provement of industrial and social conditions 
have been inaugurated. One of the unpleasant 
facts for Christian men and women to con- 
template is that the church, in the past, has so 
frequently been a weight against, instead of 
an influence for, reforms which time has 
amply exhibited as of great and enduring 
worth; that the church has so often been a lag- 
gard at the rear of the procession toward so- 
cial and political regeneration; that the pro- 
phetic spirits who have begun noteworthy 
enterprises for the correction of practical and 
preventable evils have too often been compelled 
to win the church to indorse what the church 
should have been the first to see and espouse 
and endeavor to secure. 

But that fact, depressing as it is, neverthe- 
less witnesses to the premise which has just 
been stated, that the preacher occupies a 


74 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


strategic place in the direction of social 
reform. Social reform, to be successful, has 
always had to win the church. This, more- 
over, is only one side of the shield. The his- 
tory which records the slowness of the church 
to move in the interest of social reform, re- 
cords, at the same time, a list of reforms for the 
accomplishment of which society is over- 
whelmingly in debt to the church. “Your so- 
cial reformer,” as Professor Shailer Mathews 
remarks, “had best give himself a course in 
church history.”® That list of reforms to be 
placed to the credit of the church will include 
the abolition of slavery, the progress of pro- 
hibition, the entire social, economic, educa- 
tional, and personal revolution wrought by 
Christian missions, to say nothing of those 
transformations of womanhood, childhood, and 
domestic life which are so wrought into our 
civilization as to have obscured the memory of 
their origin. History will also record the 
church’s invasions of the fields of social and 
economic injustice, by which freedoms, rights 
and powers have been from time to time 
regained for the disadvantaged many. “Every 
now and then the gospel strikes the earth 
under the feet of the common man, and he 





’ Mathews: The Church and the Changing Order, p. 168. Reprinted 
by permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers, 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 75 


rises up and demands to be counted as one.’’* 
This part of the record must also be read. 
It goes without saying that not all the 
strategy of the preacher’s position as regards 
the direction of social reform is due to the 
preacher himself. There are positions—and 
his is one of them—which give to their occu- 
pants far larger influence than the occupants 
themselves would have. The preacher’s effec- 
tiveness in influencing social reform is due, 
first of all, to the fact that he represents the 
sources of that spirit which most impels 
reform, and that he can practically affect in 
large measure the resources by which organ- 
ized reform is permanently supported. What 
is called the social passion, apart from the 
separated institutions through which it works, 
derives from the church. It is the Christian 
message which has resulted in the Christian 
ethics. Though social movements have empha- 
sized humanitarian rather than religious 
ideals, and the church gives precedence to 
religious rather than humanitarian motives, 
there is no humanitarianism worth the name 
which has not originated in religion and no 
religion congenial to the present day which is 
not humanitarian in its practical expression. 





‘Taylor: Religion in Social Action, p. 174. Used by permission of 
d, Mead and Company, publishers. 


76 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


The nobler practical impulses of the day are 
moving in one direction. It is the preacher 
whose interpretation of the gospel identifies it 
with immediate life, whose exposition of the 
New Testament, whatever may be its personal 
applications, discloses social responsibility, 
who inspires and instructs men and women in 
the obligations of human relationship. It is 
in the preacher’s prophetic function that the 
social appeal finds its most dependable and 
constant reenforcement. 

In addition, it is the men and women to 
whom the preacher speaks prophetically week 
after week, with whom he daily associates in 
influential intimacies, who supply the largest 
share of the money, time, and service which 
maintain the movements of reform. The 
preacher associates with these men and women 
in relationships at once of intelligence and 
emotion. He is constantly making those fleet- 
ing contacts which have always played so 
large, though unreported, a part in the awak- 
ening of ideals and the molding of character; 
and his influence upon their social attitudes is 
beyond estimate. Withdraw the sympathy of 
the Protestant churches from any philan- 
thropic community enterprise involving sus- 
tained effort and personal sacrifice, and its 
failure is immediate. It is the wise preacher 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 77 


who realizes these facts, not simply that he 
may know the power for good which is in his 
keeping, but that he may not entertain too 
high an opinion of his personal influence and 
opportunity disassociated from the church. 

It is his relation to the church which gives 
the preacher the high seat which he may 
occupy in the councils of the community. The 
history of society supports the assertion that 
in the larger developments of social policy, 
program, and organization no voice speaks 
with more authority, no mind works from 
more advantageous position than the preach- 
er’s. No man is welcomed with more sincere 
good will than that with which he is welcomed 
to his community’s comradeship of social good. 
To muster the men who are leading the great 
social campaigns which characterize the 
present day, is to assemble a host of Christian 
ministers. Their pulpits are dynamic with 
the social gospel while giving full place to the 
demands of worship, of consolation, and of 
faith. Their pastoral contacts, while lacking 
nothing of that personal sympathy which 
makes them comrades of the inner life, are 
informed with the spirit of a wider fellowship. 
It is their attitude which thus sets the stand- 
ard for a multitude that looks to them for 
guidance; and it is with more than individual 


%8 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


usefulness that they take their place in the 
movements of social reform. With them they 
bring the sympathy, the support, the convic- 
tions of a host whom they cannot but repre- 
sent. 

The preacher has this influence given him 
by reason of his position as the administra- 
tive head of a church, by his place in its pulpit 
and his life at the center of the experiences of 
a congregation whose representative he is. In 
addition he has a strategic place in the direc- 
tion of social reform because of certain per- 
sonal advantages. Hecan approach any social 
question, can appraise any social, industrial, 
or political movement, with a mind naturally 
in contact with all the interests involved. 
This does not imply that no preacher is ever 
prejudiced; it is to say that no intelligent 
preacher has any excuse for being prejudiced. 
No man has more swift or sure access to the 
truth, the misunderstandings, the diverse 
aims of the several parties to a social contro- 
versy, and to their unrecognized common 
interests, than has the preacher. No man can 
learn at first hand more easily than he can 
learn the results in actual human life of indus- 
trial operations, housing conditions, political 
organizations, and the like. If it be true, as 
is so constantly affirmed, that organized labor 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 79 


is alienated from the church, it is also true 
that organized labor includes but about fifteen 
per cent of all American labor; and the vast 
body of men and women whose devotion car- 
ries on the church’s missionary enterprises, 
whose personal faith blossoms in its shadow, 
whose sorrow finds shelter in its peace, whose 
lives are sustained in hope and courage and 
high character by the streams which flow from 
its altars—the vast body of its men and 
women are of those majorities whose labor 
brings them but the means of comfortable 
living, to whom luxury is unknown and wealth 
but a word. Even while organized labor is 
alienated from the church, it is the preacher 
who solemnizes its weddings, baptizes its chil- 
dren, and buries its dead; and the preacher 
may know its life, its thought, its fears, its 
passions, its spirit of resignation and of revolt, 
as no other man. 

At the same time it is the preacher who sits 
down on equal terms, socially, with those 
against whose wealth and power organized 
labor draws fast its lines of antagonism. His 
very familiarity with the life and mood of 
labor makes him significant to capital. Not 
all preachers have recognized the strategy of 
their position. Ministers of churches com- 
posed of working men and their families and 


80 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


those whose kinship in economies and thrift 
make, with them, a social unit, have often 
failed to realize that their opportunity for 
broad and intimate knowledge of that social 
unit gives them singular importance and infiu- 
ence, if tactfully asserted, in the minds of 
industrial and corporation heads, political 
leaders, and all who seriously interest them- 
selves in social concerns. Preachers in whose 
congregations wealth, poverty, and the average 
and well-to-do alike sit—and such congrega- 
tions are more common than exceptional— 
have the prophetic authority by which they 
may speak with the directness of Nathan to 
the personal responsibilities which need to be 
inspired, restrained, or rebuked. All that is 
demanded is that they shall speak out of 
knowledge instead of sentimentality, and shall 
not be led by their humane enthusiasms into 
partisanships which cannot be sustained by 
facts. For the social facts are more easily - 
secured than the common distortion of them in 
the press and on the platform would indicate. 
There is no Central Labor Union in America, 
one dare say, to which a preacher would not 
be voted a welcome, and in which he would 
not be given the privilege of the floor. There 
is no Board of Trade or Commercial Club, or 
similar civic organization, as there is no fra- 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 81 


ternal order, in which the preacher may not 
take his place side by side with the banker or 
the business man. His influence in the con- 
cerns of a community grows thus out of his 
broad contacts; and it is his amplitude of 
experience which speaks in the counsels of 
practical affairs. Charles Lamb somewhere 
asks the question, “Have we never heard an 
old preacher in the pulpit display such an 
insight into the mystery of ungoddliness as 
made us wonder with reason how the good man 
came by it?” But without confirming Lamb’s 
subtle implication as to how the good man 
came by it, only an insight into the actual life 
of his world gives any man the right to speak 
concerning that world. 

There are two preachers who exercise no 
effective influence in social reform. The first 
is the preacher whose eyes are turned wholly 
upon his church and his responsibilities within 
it, and fails to see what movements are passing 
beyond his parish lines. Walter Bagehot has 
written of Guizot that when he walks the street 
he seems to see nothing. “There have been 
revolutions in his life, and he is scarcely the 
wiser.”> There are preachers who walk thus 
through a city’s streets, seeing nothing, ignor- 





5Bagehot: Shakespeare, the Man, p.4. Used by permission of Double- 
day, Page & Co., publishers. 


82 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


ant of revolutions around them. On the other 
hand there is the preacher who seeks what he 
calls first-hand knowledge, in ways which dis- 
credit both the knowledge which he acquires 
and his purpose in acquiring it. He too fails 
to exercise any permanent influence in social 
reform. There are extremes of experience into 
which a preacher dare not go. Frederick 
O’Brien, in his White Shadows in the South 
Seas, tells of a native doctor whose surgical 
knowledge was unusually correct because he 
knew the location of the vital organs accu- 
rately from having frequently cut up bodies 
for eating. One might rely on such profes- 
sional knowledge, but nevertheless one would 
prefer the services of a surgeon whose ability 
had been acquired in more orthodox if less per- 
sonal fashion. ‘Theré are preachers whose 
insight into social ungodliness has been 
derived from intimate association; but they 
speak with little authority. They entertain, 
but they do not enlighten; they gratify curi- 
osity concerning an underworld, but they do 
not awaken consecration to a wholesome social 
task. 

In between these two extreme types is the 
preacher whom the world knows, hears, and is 
ready to heed; the preacher whose knowledge 
of his world is based upon reasonable and 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 83 


intimate experience but whose character as 
preacher is never lost in his clamorous pro- 
fessions of reformer. In a cemetery at 
Brighton, England, is a monument to Fred- 
erick Robertson, who, though dead at thirty- 
seven, was one of the great prophets of social 
righteousness and, according to Dean Stanley, 
the greatest English preacher of his age. On 
that monument are two panels, one represent- 
ing him preaching to his own people; the other 
representing him as teaching a company of 
workingmen whom he has called “Brother 
Men and Fellow Workmen.” ‘There are few 
Robertsons in present-day pulpits, but he and 
the monument above his grave suggest the 
position of the preacher and those personal 
advantages which give him strategic place in 
the direction of social reform. 

But the preacher also draws his influence in 
the direction of social reform from yet another 
source. By training, by habits of insight and 
thought, he faces frankly and dare assert with- 
out equivocation the inadequacy of reform 
which deals only with institutions. By expe- 
rience and observation the preacher cannot 
fail to realize that social discontent, whatever 
may be its contemporary objects, is as old 
as the human heart. Centuries before Christ 
the great pessimist of the Scriptures wrote, 


84 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


“That which is crooked cannot be made 
straight; and that which is wanting cannot 
be numbered.” “He that loveth silver shall 
not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth 
abundance with increase.” Eight hundred 
years ago the Persian cynic phrased the same 
spirit : 

“Ah Lova! Could you and I with Him conspire 

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 


Would we not shatter it to bits—and then 
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!” 


The preacher, who does not forget the 
antiquity of discontent, knows that its sources 
are not alone in conditions, but in character 
as well; and he can exercise an effective, if 
not immediately recognized influence in social 
reform, because he can easiest keep in view 
the ultimate objectives of reformation. He 
knows that institutions can never be reformed ; 
that only men and women can be reformed. 
He knows that while society and its organi- 
zations must be regenerated, that is possible 
and permanent only as the men and women 
who compose society and command its organi- 
zations are regenerated. He knows that the 
spirit of men, the spirit revealed in the great 
hours of life; the spirit discerned, as the 
preacher discerns it, in their disciplines of 
suffering, discovered, as the preacher discovers 


AND SOCIAL REFORM 85 


it, in their tragedies of grief, exhibited, as the 
preacher observes it, under the influence of 
nature, of responsibility, of remorse, can never 
be permanently satisfied by reconstructing the 
social machinery. That machinery never quite 
reaches the actual man. As William James 
once said of modern social movements, “the 
precipitate element is left out.” The preach- 
er’s influence may be all the more effective, 
though involving more difficulties in applica- 
tion, because he alone is likely to discriminate 
accurately between the character of social 
reform and its origin. Without doubt, what 
we have come to call the social passion is a 
product of the Christian religion; but it is not 
in itself Christianity. “The social needs of the 
age offer a very fruitful field for work, but 
the social passion is not a dynamic.’”® It is 
the preacher who, seeing the life of humanity 
under the aspect of the eternal, can most 
surely acclimate, amid the instruments of 
social reform, those inspirations of personal 
character without which the noblest social 
machinery must remain wholly mechanical, 
and life, though organized within the best 
articulated forms, remain still swept by dis- 
content. 





6 Kirk: The Religion of Power, 295. Reprinted by permission of 
the publishers, the George H. Doran Ciaae. uf Abies ey 


86 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


If the author may be permitted to speak 
now in character, it is to record the wish that 
we preachers who are in the midst of life 
to-day had accomplished all that has been 
herein suggested as our opportunity. Unhap- 
pily, we have been inheritors of an older and 
less social ideal, and only slowly have we come 
to realize the modern world. It is to our suc- 
cessors in the present age that this strategic 
opportunity offers itself with peculiar insist- 
ence and admonition. It is an opportunity 
which has been presented to us by other 
preachers, some of an earlier day, some of our 
own time, who braved and bore criticism, mis- 
understanding, and the professional and per- 
sonal tragedies which reward the social pio- 
neer. What Governor Bradford quoted from 
an earlier historian concerning the Spaniards 
in America, and applied to his own Mayflower 
Pilgrims, may be remembered of these preach- 
ers who discovered the social opportunity 
which rises before us: “With their miseries 
they opened a way to these new-lands; and 
after these stormes, with what ease other men 
came to inhabite in them, in respect of ye 
calamities these men suffered.”* It is an 
opportunity which, even in this late day, 
remains a frontier beyond which lie other 

7 Bradford: Journal, p. 165. 





AND SOCIAL REFORM 87 


lands as yet too little trodden. Upon it are 
still the frontiersman’s conflicts and his scant 
compensations. The preachers of the present 
hour occupy this strategic position in the 
direction of social reform, but they have not 
always exercised their influence to the full 
measure of their opportunity, or to the neces- 
sity of the times. That is for the younger 
generation of men who are now taking their 
place in the long tradition of the Protestant 
ministry. To them the present day puts the 
question which Silvester Horne paraphrased 
from a penetrating inquiry of John Robinson 
as he summoned his Holland Puritans to the 
adventure of the new world. “Will you be 
content to go down to your graves with your 
witness undelivered, and your bravest hopes 
unattempted? Or will you risk something, 
nay everything, to translate your theories of 
Christian freedom into a veritable free soci- 
ety ?’’8 





8Horne: The Romance of Preaching, p. 198. Used by permission of 
the Fleming H. Revell Company, publishers. 


Ly) 


THE PREACHER AND THE CREATION 
OF PUBLIC OPINION 


THE most significant scene ever reported in 
history was that of the crucifixion of Jesus 
between two thieves. Much has been written 
concerning that event, but little account has 
been taken of the fact that all three were 
there upon their crosses for defying public 
opinion. Jesus was crucified for being ahead 
of the public opinion of his time, the thieves 
for being behind it. The effective social force 
which found expression in their death was the 
same in each case—the force of public opinion. 

Unless one has given definite thought to the 
subject he does not realize to what an extent 
his life is regulated by public opinion. We 
acknowledge on every hand the guidance and 
restraint of the past as it lengthens behind us. 
From it we have inherited most of our insti- 
tutions, our basal laws, our conventions, our 
literature, and our religion. There is a cer- 
tain grand solidity about them all; and we 
obey the laws, respect the institutions, observe 
the conventions, cherish the literature, and 

88 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 89 


revere the religion. They, at least, are the 
fixed and durable framework of life. But 
when one begins to investigate them and their 
origins he discovers that they are but the 
organized public opinion of the past. Public 
opinion, pushing down through time like a 
mole beneath the surface of the ground, throws 
up these various forms of thoughts and things 
and leaves them standing through centuries of 
usefulness and, sometimes, for generations 
after their usefulness has passed. But public 
opinion itself is always a living and effective 
force. 

It is, for instance, the one support of gov- 
ernment. Someone has said that revolution is 
democracy turning over in bed; but it would 
be truer to say that revolution is democracy 
persuaded or tricked into turning a hand- 
spring. The effectiveness of law does not 
depend upon judicial systems of the state or 
upon the law-enforcement officers. The uni- 
versal testimony of magistrates and officials is 
that no law can be enforced in a community 
which does not endorse the statute, The his- 
tory of legislation in connection with disputed 
matters touching the lives, habits, and conduct 
of the people as a whole is that the enactment 
of the law must always be followed by a 
period, longer or shorter, during which public 


90 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


opinion is educated to effectual support of the 
law. The statute books contain many unre- 
pealed laws which are nevertheless as unob- 
served as if they had never been enacted; and 
it is a commonplace of everyday knowledge 
that there are laws affecting our daily life 
which are only partially enforced. The traffic 
law, for instance, prescribes a speed limit of 
fifteen miles an hour for automobiles; but the 
average and unrebuked speed maintained 
under the eye of the traffie police is from five 
to ten miles an hour faster than the provision 
of the law. Public opinion prevents the strict 
enforcement of the ordinance. 

What is true of the state and the local com- 
munity is true of the church. The church’s 
changing social outlook is nowhere exhibited 
more vividly than in the contrast. between 
some of its once rigorously maintained rules 
of conduct and the increasingly liberal prac- 
tice on the part of its membership. Rules 
remain unaltered on its books, the disregard 
of which is universal, the enforcement of 
which has become impossible. 

What has been termed the oil scandal in 
connection recently with the national govern- 
ment illustrates another aspect of the effec- 
tiveness of public opinion. Two members of 
the President’s cabinet resigned, and the most 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 91 


prominent candidate for the presidential 
nomination in the opposition party was elimi- 
nated, because of their relationship to the 
manipulations which resulted in the leasing 
of government oil lands to private interests. 
But in all the publicity and indignation which 
developed from the situation, the question 
which was not permitted to come into view 
was as to whether the leasing of the lands was 
not the most profitable thing for the govern- 
ment to do. In other words, the force of 
public opinion at any time does not depend 
upon the soundness of the public judgment. 
It has often been observed that prisons receive 
as their tenants two kinds of people—the best 
and the worst. “The man who defies public 
opinion may do so because he is a rogue, or 
because he is a prophet.” It goes without 
saying, as history has the habit of demonstrat- 
ing from time to time, that a few who defy 
public opinion as prophets turn out to be 
fools; and once in a while a fool whom public 
opinion has flung aside as a jest is proven to 
have been a prophet whose wisdom would have 
enriched or preserved society. Accurately to 
judge of men and events amid the turbulence 
of contemporary moods is not a simple matter; 
which makes more significant than ever this 
fact that public opinion is no less effective 


92 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


when it is mistaken than when it is correct. 
Society is suffering to-day “primarily not from 
unbalanced budgets and disrupted ententes 
but from wrong mental processes.”?! 

It is amid this continuing yet inconstant 
flow of public opinion that the preacher stands 
and thence exercises whatever influence he 
may, aS one of the voices that inform and 
direct that flow. To go further and say that 
his is the most advantageous voice of all the 
many thus involved, is not more than the truth; 
and it suggests a conception of the preacher 
altogether different from that which prevailed 
a generation ago. Then the preacher was pre- 
sumed to be divinely indifferent to the opin- 
ions of men. His mind was supposed to be 
set on things above, not on things on the earth. 
The Christian ideal, expressed in an irre- 
proachable phrase, was to be in the world 
but not of it. Sharp distinctions were then 
drawn between religion and mere morality, to 
the grave discredit of morality. Christians 
were accustomed to emphasize the fact that 
on earth they had no abiding city but rather 
they were only pilgrims in this world and 
therefore were obligated to concentrate their 
interests and attention upon the other world. 





1Wiggam: The New Decalogue of Science, p. 274. Copyright, 1922. 
Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 93 


It goes almost without saying that this 
other-worldly attitude of which, in essence, 
there can be no criticism, was, in its exag- 
gerated expression and practice, a break from 
the example of the great religious leaders. 
Luther, Knox, Wesley all found themselves in 
the thick of the everyday life of men, and all 
shaped their service and their message under 
the impact of contemporary events and inter- 
ests. They did not lighten the emphasis upon 
the other world, but they recognized the 
reality of this world, and early learned that it 
is the pilgrim spirit which most makes habit- 
able the lands through which it journeys. 
Few of the later schemes for what we call the 
socialization of religion but would be con- 
genial with John Wesley’s mind, as the record 
of his social outlook clearly discloses. John 
Knox cannot be taken out of the politics of his 
time without leaving his life-work unintelli- 
gible; and no frank study of Martin Luther 
but will find him, so far from being aloof from 
his practical world, to the contrary, perhaps 
too intimately involved in the unlovelier and 
over-worldly accompaniments of the Reforma- 
tion. There is an unexhausted meaning in 
Saint Paul’s observation that he became all 
things to all men that he might win some; 
not that he was a hypocritical spirit surren- 


94 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


dering to every man’s mood, but that he was a 
sagacious mind keeping touch with the cur- 
rents of opinion that amid them he might pre- 
sent this message in contacts at once intelli- 
gible and friendly. For an example at once 
of his use of, and his influence upon public 
opinion, his address at Athens is almost if not 
wholly perfect. 

The preacher is to set his mind on things 
above the earth. He is to be in the world 
and, in a very real fashion, not of it. He is 
to view life under the order of Eternity. But 
it is in living contact with the forces of public 
opinion that he must preserve these attitudes, 
and present the spiritual interpretation of his 
age. He dare not, then, be indifferent to the 
mind and mood of the age; and within the 
limits of his influence, which are the limits of 
his responsibility, if he is to be effective at 
all, he must contribute largely to the character 
of public opinion not alone on religious mat- 
ters, but on other subjects also; and he must 
strive to influence its judgments. 

It is fundamental, therefore, that the 
preacher know the state of public opinion in 
the community, whether it be a city or a town 
or a countryside; and equally fundamental 
that he be abreast of it. What is the judgment 
of the best and directive minds as to civic 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 95 


affairs, industrial and social conditions, law 
enforcement and moral reform? To what 
extent will these minds incarnate their judg- 
ments in practical action, whether it be by 
speech, philanthropy, social organization, or 
the ballot? This is the frontier on which the 
preacher’s mind must be at home and from 
which he has to speak. For there is no more 
pathetic spectacle than that of the belated 
preacher; one who, in a day of industrial 
democracy, is thinking in Victorian terms of 
unorganized labor and aristocratic privilege; 
who, in a day of vivid social responsibilities, 
is preaching a gospel of wholly individual sal- 
vation; who, in a day which emphasizes duty, 
is discoursing of religion as a philosophy of 
escape. In a day when the progress of biology 
is popularized until it is remaking the minds 
of reading men and women everywhere; when 
the high schools are familiarizing young peo- 
ple with electrons and amcebe; when the radio 
is pouring the life of the world into the sitting 
rooms of the farmhouse and the village as well 
as the city; the preacher who cannot speak 
intelligently in respect of science, who cannot 
respond intelligently to the political perplexi- 
ties raised by the events of this world, will 
speak with little effect when he discusses 
other worlds, of which it may reasonably be 


96 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


doubted whether he knows any more. His 
knowledge and his outlook upon life must 
keep pace with the best minds of his com- 
munity. 

But if the belated preacher is a spectacle 
of pathos, the too progressive preacher is an 
exhibition of futility. He may be a prophet, 
but he will draw wages as a fool. He may 
furnish entertainment, but he will provide no 
leadership. This is not to say that he will be 
mistaken. He may be correct in his views, 
precise in his judgments, informed as to his 
facts. But if these views, judgments, and 
facts are too far removed from the mental 
habit of his public they might just as well be 
mistaken, as far as their usefulness is con- 
cerned. Indeed, they might better be mis- 
taken; because many a stoned prophet may be 
suspected of having earned his shower by the 
persistent folly with which he disregarded the 
simple proprieties of common sense. No one 
knew this more surely than Jesus who is 
quoted as saying to his disciples, “I have yet 
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
bear them now.” 

While the preacher must thus live upon the 
frontier of the public opinion of his com- 
munity, whether it be a city or a circuit; 
while he must not range in public utterance 


AND PUBLIC OPINION Ue) 


too far beyond its conventional boundaries; he 
must always be open minded to the world of 
knowledge, feeling and adventure which ex- 
pands beyond it. It is his established resi- 
dence on the certain, well-known territories of 
the public opinion of his time and place which, 
when he goes out into those new lands, gives 
to his community confidence to follow toward 
larger knowledge, faith, and action. For there 
come times when the preacher must go out 
beyond the public opinion of his community. 
Much has been made, and properly, in honor 
of Samuel Hopkins, that stalwart New Eng- 
land preacher who uttered probably the first 
public protest in America against slavery. 
His congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 
was composed principally of men whose busi- 
ness interests and prosperity derived from the 
slave trade; yet on a notable Sunday morning 
Samuel Hopkins “delivered a_ testimony” 
which his conscience could not evade, that 
slavery was un-Christian and iniquitous. One 
can imagine the effect produced by such an 
utterance; and one cannot avoid the fact that 
whatever influence the utterance had was 
dependent upon the measure to which Samuel 
Hopkins had kept pace with, neither behind 
nor in advance of, the economic opinion of his 
time. To every preacher will come a time 


98 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


when he must deliver a testimony in advance 
of the public opinion of his congregation and 
much of his community, and his success will 
depend upon the close and sympathetic fel- 
lowship which his mind has had with the com- 
mon mind around him. Let a preacher who 
has been belated come surprisingly to some 
new and advanced light, and his contempo- 
raries will say that he is probably as far 
wrong in this forward direction as he has been 
customarily mistaken in the other. Let a 
preacher who has been ordinarily too advanced 
announce a new, though ever so true word of 
admonition and invitation, and his contem- 
poraries will remark that he was always try- 
ing to be different. But let a preacher who 
has been fully abreast of his contemporary 
world and local situation, who has always 
shaped his pronouncements courageously and 
yet so as to arouse no reasonable resentment 
in the directive minds around him—let such a 
preacher advocate a new advance, scientific or 
social, confirmed by some cogency of fact, and - 
presented in tactful and commanding form, 
and men and women who hesitate to accept 
his leading in this particular occasion, will 
nevertheless find themselves saying: “He has 
always been reasonable; there may be some- 
thing in this which we do not see. It is from 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 99 


such beginnings that social, intellectual, 
political progress obtains.” 

The preacher’s place amid the currents of 
public opinion imposes one certain obligation 
upon him. He must not only be responsive to 
public opinion, abreast of it, and doing his 
work within the ranges of its impact; he must 
mold it. For this he has the inestimable 
advantage of a place and a platform, a voca- 
tion and an office to which society is accus- 
tomed to pay deference. To him, by nineteen 
centuries of tradition, men and women look 
for direction, not alone spiritual, but intellec- 
tual as well; if indeed, there can be any spir- 
itual direction which is not also intellectual. 
Current literature—fiction, journal, essay, 
public address—is clamorous with the charge 
that the pulpit has lost its place in the intel- 
lectual life of men; that the world no longer 
pays attention to the opinions of the preacher. 
It is not for any one to venture ex cathedra 
judgment on so broad a scale; but personal 
observation seldom confirms the charge. When 
one has taken into account the intellectual 
shortcomings of the clergy, discarding every- 
thing in the public attitude which might seem 
to be an illusion of deference to, or an assump- 
tion of respect for a clerical opinion, which in 
reality was but a show of courtesy; then he 


100 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


will still be the more astonished at the weight 
which the general public attaches to the 
judgment of preachers who command a hear- 
ing, though it be but little beyond their parish 
lines. The very vigor with which a preacher’s 
utterances are sometimes denounced, and 
never more vigorously than when they are 
completely misunderstood, is unmistakable 
evidence of the importance which the preach- 
er’s utterances carry with them. This may 
well breed in him a noble caution that his pro- 
nouncements shall be so grounded in truth 
and supported by reason and informed with 
moral purpose as to be worthy the hearing 
they receive. But it also imposes the neces- 
sity of a fine courage as well, and suggests this 
very range of duty lying imperatively within 
the broader circumference of his commission. 
In a larger and more socially effective manner 
than the apostle had in mind, the preacher is 
to cast down imaginations and every high 
thing that is exalted against the knowledge of 
God, bringing every thought into captivity to 
the obedience of Christ. 

This is recognized at once as a service akin 
to that which the preacher accomplishes in his 
interpretation of his age; but it has even more 
positive character. The preacher may be a 
wise and faithful interpreter of the currents 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 101 


of thought, the movements, events, and tenden- 
cies of the day in which he lives, and yet not 
appreciably mold the public opinion of his 
place and time. There are innumerable books, 
for instance, which instruct the mind but 
nevertheless do not alter its attitude nor 
remove its presuppositions concerning the 
things in which it is instructed. There are 
many men whose antagonism to the demo- 
cratic ideals of labor is more intense since 
they have become accurately informed con- 
cerning them, than it was before they knew 
what those ideals involve. There are Chris- 
tian men of irreproachable sincerity who are 
as violent in their condemnation of the more 
liberal conceptions of religion as they were 
when those conceptions were but nebulous or 
a name. It is not enough, in other words, 
that the public understand what facts are and 
what they mean; its mental attitude toward 
those facts and that meaning must frequently 
be rearranged. Just as children are fright- 
ened at false faces even when they know who 
is behind them, so there are men and women 
instinctively hostile to new forms of ideal and 
purpose, though they are mentally acquainted 
with the truth those ideals and purposes seek 
to express. Public opinion is not simply an 
expression of intellectual judgment; it is 


102 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


largely an expression of feeling, standardized 
by inherited attitudes and preconceptions 
which have survived the older mental and 
moral customs in which originally they found 
sanction. The preacher has failed of one of 
his most important and productive opportuni- 
ties if, after a reasonable length of time, his 
congregation and that wider following which 
he has beyond his immediate congregation, 
have not begun, to some extent, to reflect his 
outlook upon the concerns of life. This is not 
to say that they shall think wholly as he does, 
but that their approaches to personal judg- 
ment shall be from viewpoints adopted, 
though perhaps unconsciously, from him; 
that they shall be thinking in directions 
caught, perhaps unintentionally, through the 
contagion of his thinking. 

There are three areas of intellectual inter- 
est, each inexorably productive in practical 
life, in which particularly the present-day 
preacher has the opportunity and must exer- 
cise the purpose of molding the public opin- 
ion of his community. The first of these natu- 
rally is that of religious belief and discussion. 
Notwithstanding the superficial accusation so 
frequently brought against our generation, 
namely, that it has lost interest in religion, 
there are few if any considerations in which 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 103 


it is more vitally engaged. Whether one has 
in mind the stupendous budgets of the 
churches, involving sums of money beyond the 
imagination of the most enthusiastic church- 
man of a generation ago; or the eager hearing 
which all exponents of strange faiths are 
given, from the melodious platitudes of Tagore 
to the dull futilities of Sir A. Conan Doyle; 
or whether one is concerned with the tumult 
of debate which has added fundamentalism 
to our vocabulary and introduced the comic 
spirit into our theology; our day is profoundly 
interested in religious considerations. With- 
out much advertisement of the word, though, 
it must be confessed, with some prehistoric 
survivals of the substance, theology has come 
to be once more a prime concern with multi- 
tudes of men and women. While this may 
have been more accentuated, in very recent 
years, than ordinarily, yet it is a constant 
fact with which the preacher has to deal. 
Continually waves of special religious inter- 
est move across the mental life of the nation, 
aroused by some new propaganda, or stirred 
by some new attack upon traditional belief, or 
quickened by some revolt or inquiry of the 
public mind in the face of fresh catastrophe. 
To none of these dare the preacher be indif- 
ferent. They are forces having practical effect 


104 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


upon the work to which he is called. They 
disintegrate the traditional attitudes upon 
which he has to work, they erect new barriers 
or open new gates to the complete evangel he 
has to bring. One can hardly imagine the 
pathos when, following the casualties of the 
war, there occurs a great revival of spiritual- 
ism; and charlatans by the thousand capi- 
talize the sorrow of a people and wreck for 
multitudes the once sound structures of Chris- 
tian faith and hope. One dare not under- 
estimate the undramatic but insidious disin- 
tegrations of the ideas and moralities which 
have built our civilization around the home, 
by the suave paganism of Oriental minds, 
become too easily a passing but decadent cult. 
Some years ago, to carry the illustration in a 
slightly different direction, there was a wide- 
spread discussion, on lecture platforms and in 
the public press, of the question, Is life worth 
living? The question itself raises the doubt; 
and it was morbidly interesting to observe that 
where the discussion emphasized the element 
of doubt, it was followed by an increase in the 
number of suicides. How closely related to 
the public mind the preacher is, and how sig- 
nificant is his opportunity, finds more recent 
evidence in the prohibition which Roman 
Catholic clergy are trying to make effective, 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 105 


admonishing their communicants against lis- 
tening, by radio, to Protestant religious serv- 
ices. 

Interpreting the age does not meet the 
opportunity thus surveyed; and the direction 
of social reform by no means completely satis- 
fies it. It is not enough that the preacher 
inform his congregation that the revival of 
spiritualism is a natural reaction after the 
casualties of war. It is not enough that he 
trace the invasion of America by pagan lec- 
turers and pagan literature to the curiosity 
of minds satiated with monotony—a curiosity 
reenforced also, as far as the lecturers are con- 
cerned, by the financial incentives which oper- 
ate under cover of the cultural passion. The 
preacher must remold the mind of his con- 
gregation upon the sounder philosophies and 
ampler implications of the Christian doctrine 
of immortality; he must illumine the durable 
and indispensable principles of Christian soci- 
ety and life by which alone our western civili- 
zation has proved its superiority to the East. 

In the present-day discussion between those 
who miscall themselves fundamentalists and 
those who have been labeled modernists, the 
preacher of every pulpit has one unmistakable 
duty, a duty which becomes, indeed, his abid- 
ing joy. It is not necessary that he join in the 


106 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


warfare over the specific doctrines in dispute. 
It is necessary—and many a preacher is dis- 
covering it to be the opportunity for which 
he has been waiting—that out of the specific 
debates he take occasion to shape the mind of 
his congregation and community into right 
attitudes toward religious development. It is 
his supreme opportunity, in such a time ag 
this, to mold his public opinion to support free- 
dom of thinking, to register unhesitant loyalty 
to truth, to conscience and to character; to 
recognize that the details which divide our 
religious theories and thought, inherited as 
they may be in ever so ancient a tradition, are 
negligible beside the indubitable devotion of 
the religious life. 

A second area of intellectual interest, pro- 
ductive in practical life, is that of social ideals 
and purposes. Here also the preacher has his 
advantaged and imperative place for the crea- 
tion of public opinion. Reference has already 
been made to the preacher’s strategic position 
in the direction of social reform; but it is to 
be remembered that no social reform will 
progress beyond the limit to which public 
opinion is in its favor. It is the preacher’s 
opportunity and his obligation as well, as per- 
haps it is no other’s, to keep public opinion, on 
the one hand, moving forward to the support 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 107 


of adequate and permanent reform, and, on 
the other, to hold it back from reenforcing 
those radical innovations and unsound social 
readjustments the end of which must be the 
failure which disillusions where it does not 
disrupt, and that alienates the public mind 
from legitimate reforms which, undefeated, 
would effect enduring social good. It has 
recently been remarked that “We charge the 
artist with the double responsibility of creat- 
ing both his art and his audience.”? It is as 
truthfully to be said of the preacher in his 
relation to the social implications of religion 
and the social expression of religion. He has 
not only to be effective in the interpretation 
of the one and the direction of the other; he 
has to create the public opinion which will 
enforce and maintain them. 

In this is to be recognized not only a grave 
responsibility upon the preacher of to-day, 
but one of the subtlest and most fatal of the 
perils which menace his influence. A notable 
English churchman has lately been criticized 
in an anonymous and, therefore, not very cred- 
itable volume, on the ground that his sermons 
“proclaim rather the social energy of a good 
citizen than the fervent zeal of an apostle on 


2Wiggam: New Decalogue of Science, p. 180. Copyright, 1922. Used 
by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 


108 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


fire with his Master’s message.”* The criti- 
cism itself is of small value because it may so 
easily represent the stock dissatisfaction of a 
conventional mind positive that there is no 
fire where it cannot stereotype the blaze. One 
may be on fire with his Master’s message, 
while he is attacking the too common alliance 
between a police department and protected 
vice, or debating the coordination of a city’s 
philanthropic agencies. But there is never- 
theless a very real peril that, in the preacher’s 
eagerness to mold public opinion toward cer- 
tain social interests and sympathies, he shall 
lose the one note which gives his voice its only 
carrying power. It is only because any truth 
about God is social; because, in other words, 
any social good has its roots in religious obli- 
gation, that the preacher has responsibility 
for shaping, to the utmost of his opportunity, 
the public opinion of his time and place. In 
fulfilling that responsibility is one of the pro- 
founder compensations of the preacher’s risk 
and labor. There are few hours more inspir- 
ing or more sobering than that in which it is 
disclosed to him that, here and there, through 
his congregation and his community, produc- 
tive minds are being kindled to something of 





8 Painted Windows, p. 93f. By a Gentleman With a Duster. Courtesy 
of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers, New York and London. 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 109 


his social outlook, and slowly a reckonable 
mental habit begins to rise in the directions 
he has proclaimed. 

The preacher has the opportunity, and upon 
him is the responsibility of creating public 
opinion in a third area of interest: that which, 
for lack of a more precise phrase, may be 
called the area of national policy. This obli- 
gation is now rising, for the first time, into 
general recognition; though in times of grave 
emergency this duty of the preacher’s to shape 
public opinion in what is called the right direc- 
tion has been accepted even by men and women 
who fiercely resent any pulpit utterance which 
seems to impinge upon the conventional inter- 
ests of national life. What is patriotism in 
war has not yet been able to escape the charge 
of partisanship in peace. But now men are 
beginning to see that, whatever may be the 
risk of misunderstanding, the pulpit must 
speak on those great public interests which 
form so large a part of the intellectual and 
social habit of the nation. 

That is taken for granted and widely prac- 
ticed in the pulpits of war times. One of the 
elements in our national experience during the 
recent war, an element which, as we look back 
on it, raises the most serious questioning in 
the minds of many, was the unanimity with 


110 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


which the Protestant pulpits lent themselves 
to propaganda inspired and supplied by the 
national government. They reinterpreted the 
history of the German people in terms of 
avarice, cruelty, and force. They exalted the 
services of France to the American colonies a 
hundred and forty years earlier, and the gen- 
erous friendship of British seamen at the time 
of friction between the American and German 
fleets at Manila during the war with Spain. 
They suppressed all recollection of the rasping 
contacts with France which have not been 
wholly absent from American history, and 
were nobly silent concerning British and 
American relations during the Civil War. 
Preachers who were too old to enter the army 
were relentless in their enthusiasm for the 
war; finding their support for the crusade, as 
they called it, in the New Testament and even 
in the words of Christ. This is not written in 
any criticism of the temper into which preach- 
ers and laymen alike were flung by the sink- 
ing of ships, the reported atrocities, and the 
whole tempest of indignation which swept 
around them from events abroad and pro- 
Germanism at home. It is simply illustrating 
the fact that in these times of national emer- 
gency the preacher has always contributed 
effectively to the creation of public opinion. 


AND PUBLIC OPINION 111 


It is the same part which he has now to play 
in forming the opinion of his public toward 
equally vital, though less dramatic, courses of 
national action in times of peace. It belongs 
to him, more than to any other man, to create 
the public sentiment which will accomplish 
strict enforcement of law. It belongs to him, 
as to no other man, to further in the general 
public those national tendencies and aims 
which will reduce the friction from certain 
international contacts. He alone can effec- 
tively link the great nonpartisan political 
enterprises with those moral impulses and 
moral imperatives which appeal alike to all 
men. He alone can effectively support great 
moral purposes in government and diplomacy, 
by disclosing their unrecognized sources in 
spiritual ideals, and by reenforcing their ethics 
with the authority of religion. To be once 
more specific: It is the preacher who, to-day 
and in the generation just ahead, will be the 
most powerful voice, the most compelling 
influence, in the creation of that public mind 
and ideal and conscience and conviction 
which, to use a phrase but lately coined, will 
outlaw war. 

Other great causes, of course, suggest 
themselves, which need not be specified here. 
Others will rise from time to time to face the 


112 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


nation with the duty of deeper insight, and to 
summon the preacher to new prophetic enter- 
prises. The years through which we are pass- 
ing are turbulent with the fate of nations, the 
future of peoples, the hopes of humankind. 
Only as the host of conflicting passions hear 
constantly some “deeper voice across the 
storm,” only as they are merged into a com- 
mon moral and social purpose, can there be 
wrought that tranquil culture, that just and 
satisfying government, that generous democ- 
racy of ideal and life, which can shelter and 
sustain the generations of men. Only wise 
and patient guidance of the common mind can 
so much as begin that unifying of our now 
discordant life. By tradition, by place, by 
opportunity, it is the preachers who best 
offer that guidance, and who most surely can 
create the public opinion in which that unity 
will find itself at home. Because what James 
Russell Lowell wrote of the poets is proudly 
true of the preachers who are called of God 
and look out upon the world of time in the 
light of their commission : 
“Tt is they 
Who utter wisdom from the central deep, 


And, listening to the inner flow of things, 
Speak to the age out of eternity.” 


Vv 


THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 
HOUR 


In the preceding pages and in these which 
follow, a certain character has been assumed 
as inhering in the Christian ministry, which 
has not been emphasized in recent years per- 
haps as strongly as in other generations. It is 
its character as a special vocation, not simply 
an occupation which the preacher chooses but, 
rather, a cause and call which capture him. 
One may fairly say that the minister who does 
not feel as the profound compulsion of his 
life, “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the 
gospel,” has no warrant for his ministry and 
no word for the present hour. But the true 
preacher comes to a world to-day which waits, 
in spite of itself, for a disclosure which only 
he can bring. This is the hour of opportunity 
for the prophetic insight and the proclaiming 
voice. 

This involves an unmistakable estimate of 
the preacher’s quality and place. It is not as 
condescendingly regarded as it once was, for 
all the criticism which continues to beat upon 

113 


114 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


both the man and his office. Charles Lamb 
described the Reverend John Mitford as “a 
pleasant layman spoiled.” The eighteenth- 
century parson was half chaplain, half drudge, 
who left the squire’s table before dessert and 
as Macaulay wrote, “stood aloof till he was 
Summoned to return thanks for the repast, 
from a greater part of which he had been 
excluded.” Only sixty years ago Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson recorded in his journal 
that he had stopped during an afternoon’s 
walk, to read the notices posted at a tollgate, 
and the last of them was “Clergymen and 
Funerals Gratis.” Notwithstanding clerical 
discounts which ought in all honor to be 
abolished, there is little left of that old-time 
patronizing of the preacher. Governor Brad- 
ford’s history of the Plymouth plantation pre- 
serves a letter written by the company agent 
describing certain men and stuff sent out in 
1623 ; in which is the frank remark that “The 
preacher we have sent is (we hope) an honest 
plaine man, though none of ye most eminente 
and rare”; which is about as far as any depre- 
catory observations to-day can truly go. That 
the contemporary criticism of him is so clam- 
orous is no slight tribute to the preacher’s 
strength. Its very turbulence argues the 
impact which he is making. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 115 


That is but another way of saying that the 
world estimates the preacher, as it does its 
other servants, at about the value they demon- 
strate in themselves. One dare not be un- 
mindful of the fact that many preachers are 
ineffective in life and incompetent in service. 
Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers has remarked 
of the clergymen of modern fiction that one can 
hear their souls scrape; and if that cannot be 
said of preachers in actual life, yet no one will 
deny Dr. George A. Gordon’s charge against 
some of their number that a mean kind of 
retail trade has taken possession of them. 
But at most these more ignoble members of a 
noble order are negligible. ‘A middlin’ doctor 
is a pore thing, and a middlin’ lawyer is a 
pore thing; but keep me from a middlin’ man 
of God.”? The future does not belong to him. 
That is the attitude of the world in general. 
What remains to be said concerns itself, ac- 
cordingly, with that greatening company of 
men, disciplined in mind, dedicated in life, 
ample in knowledge, eager and unaffrighted in 
the face of new truth, at home in the affairs 
of other men and not unacquainted with the 
secret place of God; who look out upon the 
world of time in the light of eternity; who 





1Wister: The Virginian, p. 214. Reprinted by permission of the 
Macmillan Company, publishers. 


116 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


hear, amid the tumult of the hour, the tranquil 
admonition of the centuries; and who, chal- 
lenged alike by the seductions of expediency 
and the attractions of the profitable and 
pleasant, declare without compromise for that 
which is right. The future does belong to 
them. For society, swept with doubt and 
cynical in its ferment, storms secure within 
the uncrumbled defenses of spiritual ideal 
and moral sanction and restraint, because the 
preacher, whose commission comes from higher 
than any times or all occasions, still declares, 
amid shifting opinions and interests that fade, 
the mighty verities by which men live. 

For such a preacher as has just been indi- 
cated, this is the hour of opportunity because 
the world to-day is defeated by the inertia of 
its knowledge, and the preacher offers it the 
dynamic of a moral passion. There can be no 
question as to what Professor Erskine has 
called the moral obligation to be intelligent ; 
but one of the salutary achievements which 
the age has yet to accomplish is the recogni- 
tion of the limits within which intelligence 
alone has value. Knowledge may add a new 
quality to enthusiasm; it may provide a base 
for adventurous curiosity; it may offer an 
asylum for the timid mind on which the spec- 
tacle of actual life breaks with too confusing 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 117 


an impact; but it may nevertheless be very 
far from wisdom, and it is not in itself the 
energy which sustains. “TI arrived at Oxford,” 
wrote Edward Gibbon, “with a stock of erudi- 
tion that might have puzzled a Doctor, and a 
degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy 
would have been ashamed.” It is obvious to 
remark that in the sheer accumulation of 
knowledge the present day exceeds any period 
of time before it. The disclosures made in the 
realm of natural science, and the application 
of scientific knowledge to practical enterprise, 
the tabulation of facts, vital statistics in the 
interest of public health, the definite results 
of historical criticism and the rediscovery of 
the past by scholarship and exploration, the 
universe of ghosts which introspection has 
discerned inhabiting the enigma of personal- 
ity—all these and more, the commonplaces of 
the intelligent interest of the day, constitute a 
store of knowledge such as no previous genera- 
tion anticipated. The effect has been unmis- 
takable. ‘No little of the bold hopes, the buoy- 
ant forecasts of inevitable social progress, 
the unrestrained confidence in the automatic 
improvement of human affairs, with which 
men indulged their yesterday, were due to the 
impression made on acquiescent minds by this 
accumulation of knowledge. It is the inertia 


118 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


of it all which is now so bewildering. Men 
know so much but seem to be no more. His- 
tory repeats with recurrent emphasis that of 
all cunningly devised fables, none is more fab- 
ulous than that knowledge is power. Knowl- 
edge may offer direction, it may inspire effort, 
it may discipline motive, but power springs 
elsewhere. 

No poets come to us with the erudition of 
Dante and Milton, so that to cite them in 
illustration will disarm suspicion that any 
discrediting of knowledge is implied. In sheer 
intellectual accumulation and range, they are 
masters of their times. But of Dante, whose 
knowledge is fused into the most spacious and 
enduring art, one of his penetrating critics 
has written that the true secret of his strange 
power is not in his art, but in his spirit; and 
“What you owe to Milton,” said De Quincey, 
“is not any knowledge; what you owe is 
power.” In connection with the latter it is 
significant also that the most intelligent and 
capacious figure in “Paradise Lost” is Satan; 
so that as Professor Erskine has observed, 
perfectly moral readers may fear lest Milton 
may have known good and evil, but could not 
tell them apart. What Dr. Fosdick some time 
ago remarked of science in particular may be 
equally well said of the accumulations of 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 119 


knowledge in general which characterize con- 
temporary life. When they have given us all 
their power, we still need another kind of 
power which it is not the business of knowl- 
edge to supply. 

This is not merely an academic discussion. 
It takes practical hold upon the sinister 
impasse to which society seems to have come 
in Europe and which seems threatening the 
world. Signor Nitti, the Italian statesman, 
said to Mr. Philip Kerr at San Remo: “There 
is a difference between you English-speaking 
peoples and us Continentals. ... Your civili- 
zation, your politics, rest upon moral ideas; 
ours on intellectual.” Circumstances permit 
one to entertain less lofty opinions of our Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples; for it is necessary only 
to turn to the letters of Walter Hines Page 
to read that at the time of the Mexican Revo- 
lution, some decade ago, in all the columns of 
newspaper comment with which he was com- 
pelled to familiarize himself, he did not see 
even an allusion to any moral principle in- 
volved, nor a word of concern for the Mexican 
people. It was all about who was the stronger, 
Huerta or some other bandit, and about the 
necessity of order for the sake of financial 
interests. “This,” the Ambassador wrote, 
‘Gllustrates the complete divorce of European 


120 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


politics and fundamental morals.”? While 
even the most patriotic observer of American 
public life recently could go no further than 
to believe the divorce between our own politics 
and fundamental morals is not irreparable. 

This is not to question the sincere purposes 
of the minds which project and develop the 
destinies of great states; it is simply to recog- 
nize the incapacity of intelligence alone. Of 
Peter Stuyvesant, the Knickerbocker History 
of New York remarks that “he wanted noth- 
ing more to complete him as a statesman than 
to think always right.” But the statesmen of 
the hour need for their completion little more 
than to will always right. It is not new inter- 
national treaties that will do the work now 
needed to be done; it is a new character in 
internationalists. Not more knowledge, but 
a moral passion is the answer to the necessi- 
ties of the present time. 

Lord Charnwood, in his penetrating study 
of Theodore Roosevelt, quotes an illuminating 
statement of President McKinley’s in connec- 
tion with his decision to take the Philippines: 
“He ‘walked the White House night after 
night until midnight, and ... went down on 
(his) knees and prayed to Almighty God for 





_ 2Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page, Vol. 1, p. 184 Used by per- 
mission of Doubleday, Page & Co., publishers. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 121 


light and guidance. ... And one night late it 
came to (him) this way: (he) did not know 
how it was, but it came: that ... there was 
nothing ... to do but to take them all and to 
educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize 
and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to 
do the best we could by them as our fellow 
men for whom Christ died.’ ”* 

There is the dynamic moral passion opera- 
tive through a President; but it is the preacher 
who alone offers it commandingly amid the 
inertia of the world’s knowledge. Many voices 
are calling across the wreckage of present-day 
desire: science, education, political expedi- 
ency, commercial interest—a groping tumult 
of frantic, blind intent. One voice has this 
note of victorious constraint. 

In the “Alcestis” of Euripides, Hercules 
comes to the home of his friend Admetus, 
ignorant of the tragedy which has resulted in 
Alcestis’ death; and, kept in ignorance until 
after he has feasted, he learns from a servant 
the direful truth. Then he makes his great 
resolve; and to read the lines is to wonder 
once again at the genius which, after twenty- 
five centuries, can so capture imagination and 
awake emotion with the recital of exploits 





?Charnwood: Theodore Roosevelt, p. 123. Used by permission of The 
Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc., publishers. 


122 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


which never occurred by heroes who never 
lived. Hercules hears from the servant that 
Alcestis has been carried away by death and, 
standing there, suddenly dignified for all the 
festal garlands on his head, lifts himself and 
Says, 

“O heart, O hand, great doings have ye done 

Of old: up now, and show them what a son 


Took life that hour, when she of Tiryn’s sod, 
Electryon’s daughter, mingled with her God!’ 


and goes out; to return, disheveled, labored, 
but behind him, between two attendants, 
Alcestis torn from the mighty grip of Death 
and made to live again. 

There is the preacher, meeting the tragedy 
of the world not with a philosophy, but with 
a passion ; not with an accumulation of knowl- 
edge but with a divine deed. He, and he alone, 
shows a defeated society what a Son took life 
that other hour of destiny. The world recalls. 
“Though we crucified Christ on a _ stick,” 
George Bernard Shaw said, “he somehow man- 
aged to get hold of the right end of it; and 
if we were better men, we might try his plan.” 
_ The preacher, with an authority none other 
dare assume, declares anew the power of God 

“ .. on this dark world to lighten it, 

And power on this dead world to make it live.” 
~~ +The Alcestis”; Gilbert Murray’s translation, p. 48. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 1238 


“This man,’ as the English Ambassador 
Randolph wrote from Edinburgh, concerning 
John Knox, “puts more life in us in one hour 
than six hundred trumpets blustering in our 
ears.” 

This is the hour of opportunity for the 
preacher, also, because the world to-day is 
betrayed by the tentative character of social 
reform; and only the preacher can speak with 
authority to its conscience the effective chal- 
lenge of personal obligation. The nobler 
result of the Wesleyan movement, wrote John 
Richard Green, “was the steady attempt, 
which has never ceased from that day to this, 
to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physi- 
cal suffering, the social degradation of the 
profligate and the poor.” It is possible that 
this appraisal of the social results of the Wes- 
leyan revival is accurate, but it is inapplicable 
to the social ideals of the churches to-day. 
The social creed of the churches now extends 
far beyond remedies, and aims at the causes 
of ignorance, suffering, and social degrada- 
tion. It occupies no narrower purpose than 
that of social justice. But the fact must be 
remembered with increasing conviction that 
social reform is an inescapable part of the 
Christian enterprise, and that much of the 
serious conditions which now prevail in so- 


124 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


ciety, and particularly in industry, are due to 
the mishandling of the social adventure which 
the church began. 

The large and durable advantages which 
have come to society as a whole from the devel- 
opment of the social passion and the conduct 
of the movements for social justice are appar- 
ent. Childhood has been steadily rescued 
from the bitterness of premature labor. Mul- 
titudes have regained their ancient right of 
leisure. The margin of economic security has 
been accomplished for many who yesterday 
had no future but fear and destitution. Priv- 
acy, comfort, health, and a stake in the land 
have been made possible to thousands who 
formerly were little more than herded crea- 
tures of events and accident. Horizons have 
been given to men and women who heretofore 
had only limits. For an unreckonable host 
labor has ceased to mean social helplessness 
and has become power, while bare existence 
has blossomed into life. The result has been 
easily apparent, and almost as fatal. With 
the assumption of inevitable progress in its 
mind, and the spectacle of physical comfort 
and freedom before its eyes, a generation 
rested its expectations of the future on the 
mechanical relationships among men and on 
the adjustment of the social order to satisfy 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 125 


the persistent human need. It discovered, 
quite to the contrary, that every improvement 
in the condition, the comfort, the privilege and 
the capacity of men, is accompanied by a com- 
mensurate enlargement of desire; that these 
increasing social gains pour in upon an unsat- 
isfied discontent as the “rivers run into the 
sea, yet the sea is not full.” 

This betrayal, of course, goes deeper than 
mere discontent, however violent or revolu- 
tionary the discontent may be. Increased 
wages, shorter hours, the privileges of reason- 
able labor have not made workmen more hon- 
est in their work or more interested in the 
service it is presumed to render; just as 
increased wealth has not made rich men more 
just, more generous, more responsive to the 
rights of the public, or more ready as they are 
more competent to serve society. There are, 
of course, fewer and less biting social injus- 
tices than there were, and there will be still 
fewer to-morrow. The wrongs which rise from 
technic of organization, from class inherit- 
ances and the solidifications of ancient custom, 
are diminishing before the expansions of social 
reform. But the basal wrong largely remains, 
namely, the economic estimation of life itself, 
which is unchanged by any changes in the 
terms of temporal good. Society organized 


126 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


around high wages is just as materialistic and 
incompetent as society organized around low 
wages. Humanity appraised in terms of com- 
fort is as mean as humanity indicted in terms 
of misery. The direction of development 
seems to be better, but there is no terminus in 
sight; and there can be no satisfaction until 
men discern beyond the process a result 
which deserves and promises to be permanent. 
Saint John’s vision of a holy city is far more 
reassuring than any commonwealth of closed 
shops or tax-exempt securities. Reform in the 
machineries of materialism can never satisfy 
the spirit. By reaction it may, on the other 
hand, betray men into the impotence of gen- 
eralizations. As Professor Sperry has put it, 
“The social gospel is in a fair way to develop 
a breed of Christians who face every moral 
challenge with the evasion, ‘Lord, what wilt 
thou have the social order do?’ ”® 

It is the preacher who to-day thunders upon 
the world whose tragedies have wakened a 
willingness to hear what its self-assurance for- 
merly ignored, the reliable solvent of personal 
obligation. One of the banners carried by the 
English political reformers of 1848 bore the 
legend, “More Pigs and Less Parsons.” But 





5Sperry: The Disciplines of Liberty, p. 83. Used by permission of the 
Yale University Press. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 127 


increasingly men are discerning that the more 
pigs there are, the more parsons there must 
be; the more material prosperity, in other 
words, the more need there is for the repeated 
admonitions of the higher personal life. One 
of the associates of Bishop Bashford, speak- 
ing of him as a preacher, said significantly, 
“No matter what his subject, if he begins with 
the multiplication table, he will wind up with 
the Sermon on the Mount.”® That is the pro- 
phetic logic with which the preacher is divinely 
commissioned, and of which he is authenti- 
cally possessed; and men turn, as has been 
observed, ‘“‘to the gospel of Galilee with 
renewed interest because the gospel of Man- 
chester has proved such a shabby substitute.” 

This is not to be taken for something of that 
unctuous optimism which so frequently makes 
the children of light seem more ludicrous than 
illumined, the optimism which takes for 
granted that the world is crowding to the 
reproach of Christ. It is not necessary to 
accept Dean Inge’s cynical declaration that 
Christianity will never be acceptable to the 
majority, in order to acknowledge that men 
are not hurrying to the altars of the church as 
doves to the windows. The preacher comes 
to the challenge of the social mood to-day, not 


§Grose: James W. Bashford, p. 65f. 





128 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


as a shepherd singing to a willing flock, but 
as a prophet declaring inexorable and com- 
manding truth to a generation whose betrayals 
drive it to hear him. Around him is the 
tumult, but in his voice is thunder; and “God 
be thanked who has matched us with this 
hour!” 

This is the hour of opportunity for the 
preacher, furthermore, because the world to- 
day is imperiled by its perversions of liberty; 
and the preacher proclaims with searched and 
questioned, but impregnable sanctions, the 
productive securities of law. The author of 
a recent historical study, calling attention to 
the fact that civilization has reached its 
present stage only after a long and hazardous 
mental journey, makes the arresting remark 
that its achievements and hopes of greater 
things are now largely in the hands of men 
and women who know little of that hazardous 
journey and have no clear idea of their own 
responsibility toward the future of mankind. 
That is a historian’s way of referring to the 
very evident dangers of democracy, the in- 
capacity of majorities, and the untrustworthy 
impulses of the crowd. It also suggests, per- 
haps, some reason for what must be patent to 
any thoughtful observer of contemporary life 
—its mood of fretful independence, its dis- 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 129 


regard of old restraints, its rejection of the 
disciplines of conduct, relationship, and 
desire, all of which are features in and factors 
of these yeasty times. What Thomas Carlyle 
wrote eighty years ago remains still true. 
“Brethren, we know but imperfectly yet, after 
ages of Constitutional Government, what 
Liberty and Slavery are.” 

To a thoughtful mind the contemporary 
world presents aspects of revolution, no less 
significant because sheer force of arms, on any 
universal scale, is, as yet, but a figure very 
dim amid the shadows. Here, for instance, is 
the newer criticism, analyzing the making of 
mind, and apparently mistaking disintegra- 
tion for deliverance; assuring the inquiring 
present that the only meaning of the past is 
that it has no meaning whatever. Here is a 
practical psychology exhibiting the secret 
places of the heart in order to demonstrate 
that the baser passions are the deepest and 
most authoritative disclosures of life’s char- 
acter and intent; and that the glory of personal 
experience is to escape from the restraints 
which differentiate humanity from the beasts. 
Here, also, is a new liberalism in religion; not 
the reverent and cultured liberty of a Chris- 
tian man which, while lacking the evangelical 
fervors, has given to Protestantism a grate- 


130 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


ful sweetness and light; but, rather, a blatant 
denial of the older imperatives of religion, an 
indifference to the sanctions of millenniums 
of spiritual insight proven in noble living; a 
noisy insolence of thought and feeling in revolt 
against the austere admonitions of experience. 
While across the broad landscapes of social, 
industrial, and political concern comes storm- 
ing up the menace of the armed class war. 
The strength of the danger draws from the 
passion to which this revolutionary mood 
appeals, the high and hallowed prerogative of 
freedom which it invokes. The inviolable inde- 
pendence of the personal spirit, the right to 
express one’s life unimpeded by the restraints 
of ancient custom or inherited prudence, or 
social conventions which have survived the 
occasions which first gave them sanction— 
these are the principles on behalf of which 
the elder inhibitions are battered down by the 
pressure of indulgences which history does not 
authorize and experience has not confirmed. 
In thought, in life, in labor, in the realms of 
faith and order, the world seems to have 
accepted an arrogance of unrestraint for the 
proud but humble pursuit of just responsi- 
bility which is the true pledge of liberty. Men 
have become so obsessed with freedom that 
they have forgotten what they are free to do. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR 181 


They are so engaged with their independence 
that they are slaves to the transient hour. 
They are so eager to be themselves that they 
fail often to be right. As Principal Forsyth 
put it, they have been brandishing liberty 
instead of exercising service. That imperial 
sobriety with which men once accepted, as a 
chrism, the solemn opportunity of self-direc- 
tion, has been lost in the uninformed selfish- 
ness which admits no master and acknowl- 
edges no God. 

It is to this hour that the preacher comes 
with one prophetic and, ultimately, inescap- 
able reality to which society and individual 
thought alike must return. Amid the waver- 
ing accents of legislation which has failed and 
legislators who are frightened; amid the acid 
irreverence of the criticism which would 
crumble the reproachful past and the profane 
selfishness which disintegrates the nobler pos- 
sibilities of the present; amid the pessimism 
which identifies narrowness with zeal and 
ignorance with orthodoxy, and cries mourn- 
fully of vanished times—amid them all the 
authentic preacher stands declaring the one 
reality in which liberty and law are synthe- 
sized in effective life. 

One of the luminous though little remem- 
bered portraits in English literature is that of 


132 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


the father of the Bronté sisters, led into his 
pulpit and standing there, “a gray sightless 
old man, his blind eyes looking straight out 
before him,” while his words keep falling with 
all the force and vigor of his best days. There 
is a mystic, seerlike atmosphere which haunts 
that portrait and suggests something of the 
noblest qualities of the preaching ministry. 
But there is another figure more apt as an 
illustration of the preacher of to-day: George 
Whitefield, as Dr. S. Parkes Cadman charac- 
terizes him, who “had the art of mingling the 
infinite with the commonplace, which is one 
requisite of effective preaching.” Of White- 
field, Dr. Cadman writes that “he exalted God 
until everything pertaining to law, duty, and 
conduct became strangely solemn and momen- 
tous.”* Not otherwise will law, duty, and 
conduct become solemn and momentous now; 
and it is the preacher alone who challenges 
and checks and eventually will rectify the per- 
versions of liberty with the subduing recogni- 
tion of a rediscovered God. 

Finally, also, if a paragraph may be devoted 
to what might engage a chapter, the preacher 
finds the present age his hour of opportunity 
because, amid the progress of knowledge, the 





7Cadman: Ambassadors of God, p. 69. Reprinted by permission of 
The Macmillan Company, publishers. 


AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 13838 


programs of social readjustment, the inspira- 
tions of expanding freedom, to him alone has 
been committed the ministry of consolation. 
What has just been said has dealt with the 
more heroic aspects of his vocation and life, 
amid which the preacher stands as a com- 
manding and strategic figure on a wide-flung 
battlefield. But it is not to be forgotten that 
on every battlefield are many casualties. Men 
are not yet done with what Walter Pater 
called “the stream of human tears always fall- 
ing through the shadows of the world.” There 
are a hundred altering experiences of dis- 
illusionment, but the tragedy of suffering, loss, 
and sorrow remains basally single and un- 
changed. One cannot apprehend the world as 
it is to-day and leave out of account the wist- 
ful anguish of a generation which, by war and 
pestilence augmenting the procession of mor- 
tality, has been driven to storm the gates of 
mystery to learn what landscape lies beyond 
its graves. The prominence of a renascent 
spiritualism, and the response which it has 
received, ornamented, as it has been, by emi- 
nent intelligences and eloquent of noble 
names, does not argue simply the multiplica- 
tion of curious minds, but, rather, the eager- 
ness of broken hearts in whose bewilderment 
knowledge has proven inadequate and faith 


134 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 


too dim. Amid their sorrows men and women 
still “stretch out their hands in love of that 
farther shore,” discovering anew that no mere 
continuity of existence or of consciousness 
from which moral significance and a personal 
God alike are absent, can satisfy their illimit- 
able griefs. 

But as Charlotte Bronté wrote, “there are 
some consolations ... too fine for the ear not 
fondly and forever to retain their echo; caress- 
ing kindnesses—loved, lingered over through 
a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, 
and answering the call with undimmed shine, 
out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death 
himself.” No man can speak those consola- 
tions as can the preacher. The vision sustain- 
ing humanity’s ideals and endeavors may 
draw from many springs; but the only stream 
by which its sorrows may be tranquillized to 
strength and patience is that which proceeds 
out of the throne of God. In Matthew 
Arnold’s words, “The Cross still stands, and 
in the straits of the soul makes its ancient 
appeal.” And life, bewildered, broken, lonely 
amid its memories and hysterical among its 
hopes, knows no figure as authentic as the 
spokesman of the Cross. 


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